Phillip J. Eby <pje@telecommunity.com> wrote:
Control isn't the issue; it's ensuring that fixes don't get lost or reverted from either the external version or the stdlib version. Control is merely a means to that end. If we can accomplish that via some other means (e.g. an Externals/ subtree), I'm all for it. (Actually, perhaps Packages/ would be a better name, since the point is that they're packages that are maintained for separate distribution for older Python versions. They're really *not* "external" any more, they just get snapshotted for release.)
IMO, the better way is exactly this you depicted: move the official development tree into this Externals/ dir *within* Python's repository. Off that, you can have your own branch for experimental work, from which extract your own releases, and merge changes back and forth much more simply (since if they reside on the same repository, you can use svnmerge-like features to find out modifications and whatnot). Maintaining an external repository seems like a larger effort, and probably not worth it. Giovanni Bajo