On Sun, 21 Dec 2003, Harald Welte wrote:

> - no wholefile-patches in CVS.  This means that entirely new files like
>   net/ipv4/netfilter/ipt_foo.c / ipt_foo.h are not stored as patches but
>   rather in their original form.   This in turn means real version
>   control on the sourcecode!

One idea for further improvement:

It would be nice if runme could support "wholefile modifications" where
both the whole original and patched files are stored rather than a diff
(patch generated on the fly when applying to the kernel source tree). This
simplifies the development phase of a extension requiring patching of
other files and also simplifies maintenance of major rewrites.

I have been using the above model for a number of kernel projects for a
long time and find it very successful at tracking the changes. What I do
is that my development tree only contains the changed files, and then a
script copies the changes over to the kernel tree. The script is designed
in such manner that it can be run multiple times to copy over new changes
to a already patched tree, completely eleminating the need to directly
modifying the full source tree directly during development.

The script I am using is attached to this message. to try it out grab for
example a copy of the user-mode-linux CVS tree or another project using
"full modified files" source layout, then place the script in the top 
level directory (the equivalence of the Linux top level source directory) 
and then run the script supplying the path to your full kernel tree as 
argument.

Note that agree that the main CVS repository probably should contain
patches like it is now rather than "wholefile patches".  But during
development I find maintaining a patch file is a little awkward and some
kind of changes easily get lost. And in the few cases where a patch mostly 
rewrites a existing file having it as a full file makes more sense than 
patch format.

> However, some stuff is still missing (see the patch-o-matic/TODO file).
> I'm working on implementing those missing features, though.

What is also missing is a equivalence to the NEWPATCHES document.

Regards
Henrik