Free Software Linux

Today, I spent some time looking at better ways to organize the Portage tree in git, and I'm interested in getting feedback on what I've done. Please take a look at my new portage-new git repository. This new repository contains both the main gentoo.org tree in the "master" branch, and the funtoo.org tree in the "funtoo.org" branch. This seems to be a much better way to organize things, for the following reasons:

1. It's space-efficient - the trees are over 99% similar, and now a single clone operation grabs both.
2. There is a unified history - you can easily see the differences between the trees by typing "git diff master funtoo.org".
3. The GitHub Network Graph now shows how the gentoo.org and funtoo.org tree relate to one another, which is useful. In the funtoo.org tree, you can see where I'm pulling from.
4. It allows people to easily switch between both trees with a simple "git checkout" command.

If you want to test out portage-new and see how the branches work, please consult my updated wiki documentation but clone "portage-new" rather than "portage". I have the repo name as "portage" in the wiki docs because I'm already anticipating making this tree the official one in a few days. I think this is probably the repository model to use for Portage git development. If someone wants to use this tree as the basis for their own development, they can clone the tree and create a foobar.org branch that contains their changes. This will allow them to benefit from the multiple-branch model and facilitate easier integration and diffs with upstream. Barring any major complaints, in a few days I am probably going to delete my two existing portage git repositories and rename portage-new to portage, and it will become the official one. Let me know what you think.

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