Re: what make-dist should include [was Re: Emacs pretest 26.1.91 is out]

[Mike Kupfer <mkupfer@alum.berkeley.edu>]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > When I unpack an Emacs tarball, I usually check it into a fresh
> > Mercurial repo before building.
> 
> Interesting.  I wonder why you do that.

It's so I can apply in-progress patches using Mercurial Queues (MQ).

> To me, if I wanted to have a backing VCS, I'd start from a `git clone`
> rather than a tarball.

Maybe there's an easy way to manage this with Git, but I don't see one.
First, I want to build, with the patches, on multiple systems.  That
means rebasing is out, or at least it becomes more of a hassle.  Second,
the patches are usually independent.  So, IIUC, the "correct" approach
would be to have a branch for each patch, plus another branch to merge
all the per-patch branches, so that I can build with them all.

With MQ the workflow is pretty simple:

  - unpack the tarball
  - create the repo and commit the unpacked files
  - pull the patches from their repo
  - apply the patches ("hg qpush -a")
  - build

mike