Bug#904302: Why outlawing vendor-specific patch series would be a bad idea
On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 07:33:02PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Adrian Bunk writes ("Bug#904302: Why outlawing vendor-specific patch series would be a bad idea"):
> > The main misconception is that there would always be *the* source.
> >
> > Steps you might have before the compilation starts:
> > 1. dpkg unpacks upstream sources
> > 2. dpkg applies patches
> > 3. debian/rules unpacks upstream tarballs as part of the build
> > 4. debian/rules applies patches based on distribution
> > 5. debian/rules applies patches based on release
> > 6. debian/rules applies patches based on architecture
>
> I disagree that (4) should ever be relevant. There should never be
> any patchese applied conditionally based on dpkg-vendor, for the
> reasons I explained very recently in response to the liferea example./
>
> We don't ever do (5), do we ? Please tell me we don't. We can have
> different source code in our different releases.
For packages like src:firefox-esr the same source code might
be maintained to support releases ranging from oldoldstable to
unstable - 52.8.0esr-1~deb7u1 is a security update for wheezy
that is technically a backport of a package in buster/sid.
I do not know whether firefox-esr does patching based on release right
now, but this is a case where one package is being used to provide
security support for up to 4 different Debian releases at the same time.
I would also not be surprised if some package would do different
patching based on release for easy rebuilding in stable-backports,
this would sound like a natural solution to me.
> I can see that (6) might be needed in some exceptional cases but
> normally there is a better way.
As I said, src:gcc-8 does all of steps 3-6.
Much of the relevant code is in
https://sources.debian.org/src/gcc-8/8.2.0-4/debian/rules.patch/
Things are even more interesting due to this being a debian/ shared
between Debian and Ubuntu which are using different upstream sources.[1]
> Ian.
cu
Adrian
[1] GFDL
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"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
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