Why quilt instead of dpatch?

["Andres Mejia" <mcitadel@gmail.com>]

Well, it's been suggested to me by goneri and sam to use quilt over
dpatch. I've learned to use dpatch by reading the man pages, looking
under /usr/share/doc/dpatch, and looking at some packages that use
dpatch like gcc-4.1. I decided to look into using quilt so I looked
through the usual stuff (man pages, /usr/share/doc/quilt) and then I
tried to look through the linux kernel package since it's mentioned in
the quilt package's long description that quilt was designed by and
for linux kernel hackers.

So as I was looking, to my surprise, the linux kernel does not
build-depend on either quilt or dpatch. They use a custom python
script (debian/bin/patch.apply). You can see for yourselves.

http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/linux-2.6/linux-2.6_2.6.22~rc5-1~experimental.1.dsc
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/linux-2.6/linux-2.6_2.6.21-5.dsc

I've then tried to find some online documentation. The quilt's webpage
documentation was absolutely worthless
(http://savannah.nongnu.org/cookbook/?group=quilt) and the best page
I've found provided the same pdf file found under /usr/share/doc/quilt
(http://www.suse.de/~agruen/quilt.pdf).

So far, I've seen no reason to use quilt as they both offer the same
functionality in regards to applying patches while building packages.
If someone wants to show me how quilt can help me make packages
better, feel free.

This was rather discouraging. I much rather had spent the time fixing
bugs assigned to the team and improving packages.

--
Regards,
Andres Mejia