[csw-maintainers] GAR: garlinks and testing branches

[Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski]

I remember that when Dago was working on alternatives, he asked people
to test the new branch.  At the time, I didn't test the branch much, I
did maybe one build of MySQL with it.  The reason was that I thought I
had to update svn:externals for every package I wanted to test, or to
manage directories by hand.  There is a garlinks command which makes
"gar" symlinks in all the packages, pointing to mgar/gar/v2.  It's a
very nice solution, as it makes all the packages use the same
directory with GAR sources.  However, if one wants to switch the
packages to another branch, it's necessary to go through all the
directories and change the gar links.

How about the following:

mgar
|-- gar
|   |-- current -> v2
|   `-- v2
`-- pkg
    `-- foo
        `-- trunk
            `-- gar -> ../../../gar/current

In this way, it's enough to change one symlink to make all the builds
use another branch.  This would make testing GAR branches much easier.
 Thoughts?

Maciej