Integrating 3-rd party software with local modifications, using Subversion

(A rather long title, I’d say :-)

Anyway, most probably this has been described somewhere on the net, it’s just that I could not find it. So, first why and then how I went about it.

The problem to be solved

I use an open-source tool, call it T, and do my local modifications to it. What I needed was full tracking of both the T’s original distros and my changes in one repository, with merging upstream upgrades into the changes.

How to do it

Create repo structure like this:

The T/release-N.N directories are created by svn import <repo-url>.../T/release-N.N statements, fired in root directory of the T’s distro in that particular N.N release.

Assume we have T release 1.0 with local modifications in trunk (got there by e.g. svn copy from release-1.0, then comitting the mods). The task is to merge-in the “upgrade” to release 1.1 into our mod.

So, cd to trunk and do svn merge with URLs of the T/release-1.0 and T/release-1.1 as sources, and current (trunk) dir as destination. This takes head revisions on the import tags, makes their diff, merges that diff into the local modifications on trunk.

Footnote

It’s much easier with Mercurial

new Feb 27, 02:28 / edit Jan 1, 01:33 / link

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