vendor-branch

We have a large vendor branch (1200 odd files) that has recently undergone some non-trivial changes, which I'd like to integrate back into the trunk. It updates fairly frequently and we'll need to update equally frequently, so doing it by hand is going to involve far too much wasted time. This is what svn_load_dirs.pl was made for, only I've no perl interpreter and going through the the layers of bureaucracy to get one installed would, based on past experience, take longer and involve more pain than doing the merge by hand each time. We do have a python interpreter, and svn_load would do the

The scene: A purchased web application, with regular updates from the vendor. We then, heavily customize the look and sometimes add our own functionality or fix a bug before the vendor gets to it. For version control, we have been using Subversion following their “Vendor Branch” model each time we received a new release. This has the added benefit that we have a, version controlled, vanilla copy of their system. The problem: We would like to switch to Mercurial and will likely follow the stable/default branching pattern. Mercurial makes perfect sense if we were to only receive a single release

A Git project has within it a second project whose content is being worked on independently. Submodules cannot be used for the smaller, as even the subproject must be included when users attempt to clone or download the 'parent'. Subtree-merging cannot be used, as the subproject is being actively developed, and subtree merging makes it very difficult to merge those updates back into the original project. I have been informed that the solution is known in the SVN world as "Vendor Branches", and that it is so simply done in Git so as to not even need addressing. Half-baked tutorials abound on