Bug#904302: Why outlawing vendor-specific patch series would be a bad idea
On Sun, Aug 19, 2018 at 12:11:01PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote:
>...
> On Sun 19 Aug 2018 at 09:51PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>...
> > For a user it doesn't make a difference which tool applies the patches.
>
> In my mind, it does; it matters whether or not it is part of the package
> build. That's just my expectation of what reasonable users will think.
>
> We're discussing what users will reasonably expect. If you and I have
> different intuitions about the expectations that reasonable users will
> form, we're going to have to agree to disagree.
>...
The user sees that the sources get unpacked, and that patches get applied.
You are saying that the reasonable user will expect that these patched
sources might not be the sources that will get built, and that a
reasonable user will expect that additional patches might get applied
during the build.
Yes, we have to agree to disagree on that.
> > Note that you were also arguing based on a different source
> > definition:
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 09:22:17AM +0800, Sean Whitton wrote:
> >> For example, someone might want to use a Debian system to investigate a
> >> bug on an Ubuntu system. They might begin by downloading some source
> >> packages from the Ubuntu mirrors. Since they obtained them from Ubuntu,
> >> they will form the reasonable expectation that unpacking these source
> >> packages will get them the code running on the Ubuntu system they are
> >> debugging.
> >
> > This would be useful for debugging problems.
> >
> > But it is important to understand that in the general case there will
> > always be cases where the code running on your system will depend on
> > the architecture of your system - after applying patches the sources
> > might be architecture-specific.
>
> Unless I'm missing something, that can only be true when the application
> of patches to which you refer occurs during the package build.
dpkg-source -x --vendor=Ubuntu --arch=arm64 hello_2.10-1.dsc
--vendor should be implementable today based on vendor-specific patch series.
--arch would require similar support for arch-specific patch series.
I am not saying that a complete solution would be easy to implement,
or that this might happen anytime soon.
But the long-term goal should be to abolish patching during the package
build, by bringing more conditional patching functionality to dpkg.
This will allow packages to move away from their own custom patching
systems.
And it will give the user the sources that will actually get built.
> Sean Whitton
cu
Adrian
--
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of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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