Question about IcedTea patches

[Alex Kasko]

Hi,

I have a question about IcedTea patches.

As far as I understand (please correct me if I am wrong further), some 
IcedTea7 specific changes are kept in icedtea7-forest/* mercurial 
repositories and other changes are kept as patches in icedtea7 
repository. And it was done so (besides legacy reasons) to be able to 
apply different patches for different configure switches.

Won't it be better to have all the changes (to upstream OpenJDK code and 
makefiles) in forest/* repositories?

Changes for different configure switches may be kept as branches and 
configure script may merge selected branches with the same logic that is 
used now for applying patches. If coupling configure with DVCS is not 
desired (e.g for source releases) patch files may be created from 
selected branches on the fly (git format-patch) during the developer 
build or source release preparations.

Is this approach technically possible or there are more complications I 
miss?

-- 
Regards,
Alex Kasko