Re: Breaks in lenny
Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> quilt and dpatch are commonly used but as someone who has done extensive
> work on packages for which I wasn't the Debian maintainer I would like
> to put on record that they are IMO very much _not_ best practice.
I understand that you and a few other DDs feel that way, but you appear to
be outnumbered at the moment. Personally, I much prefer to work on
packages where I'm not the maintainer if they use quilt and/or dpatch; it
makes me far more comfortable than dealing with the giant wad of patch
approach.
> Best practice is to use a proper revision control system (one which can
> do patch stack management if that's desired) and generate a consolidated
> .dsc/.diff.gz for people who don't want to get to grips with it.
It may be that this will be what finally gets us away from using such
tools, but I'm not sure how long it will take. I think that approach has
a lot of potential, and it's definitely better than telling people not to
use quilt and dpatch at all and just use their revision control system,
which in my experience makes life very painful for someone other than the
maintainer who wants to work on the package.
I'm happy to support going in that direction, but I think we'll need to be
realistic about how long it will take to move the whole project. quilt
and dpatch have been building momentum for quite a while now, taking over
from the wad-of-patch approach, and any replacement will take at least as
long (and probably longer if its not VCS-agnostic).
I'm hoping to have time shortly to start working on Policy 3.7.4, btw.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: