On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 1:03 PM, Geoffrey Romer <gromer@google.com> wrote:

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 8:53 AM, Nat Linden <nat@lindenlab.com> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 5:22 PM, Geoffrey Romer <gromer@google.com> wrote:

I find myself spending an inordinate amount of time reapplying our local patches for Boost bugs every time a new version comes out, seemingly with no end in sight.

It seems to me that this is exactly what Vendor Branches:
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch07s05.html
is intended to address.

Yeah, that's a good idea. Unfortunately, our local source control is not Subversion, and maintaining a local svn repository just for occasional Boost upgrades seems like overkill. There may be some way to get our source control to interoperate with svn in a way that will make this work, but if so, I haven't found it.

? The technique doesn't seem to be specific to Subversion; it's about getting your revision-control system to merge, into your (locally-modified) trunk, the delta needed to update from the previous Boost version to the newer Boost version. Mercurial even has 'hg addremove', which looks to me like an improvement over svn_load_dirs.pl.

One reasonable approximation to this approach would be if I could generate a patch file that takes one release version of Boost to the next; I could then apply that patch to perform the upgrade, and my local modifications would remain intact (except in the case of conflicts, which I can merge by hand).

Yes, exactly!

However, I haven't been able to work out how to identify a particular release version of Boost in the repository, in order to generate such a patch.

Hmm, I'm not quite sure what you're saying here.