[gentoo-user] Advice sought on the use of a VCS (specifically git) to keep track of my Softscroll patch.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Gentoo.

Over the last few months I've posted several versions of my kernel patch
which re-enables soft scrollback.  I thought at the time I could just
keep a few files informally in my home directory.  But I'm already
getting confused about what is where, what applies to which kernel
versions and so on.

Clearly I need to put the patch into a version control system.  I would
appreciate some advice on this.

I think I need to get a clone of the kernel's git repository, and
maintain the patch in it as a branch or several branches.  Or would it be
feasible just to maintain the patch in a VCS?  My feeling is that I
really need the full repository.

Where would I find a suitable kernel git repository to clone?  An
"official" repository, whatever that means?  Ideally, I want one with
just the various kernel releases, not one containing gigabytes of
intermediate versions.  Where would I even start searching to find this
out?

Once I've got this far, I'll need to think about a versioning scheme for
the patch - there are irritating little differences in the console code
between versions of the kernel, as recently pointed out by Jorge Almeida,
so there would be irritating differences between versions of the patch.

Maybe I could put it onto the Gentoo wiki, but that's not in the near
future.

Thanks for the help!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).