Re: How to cope with patches sanely (Was: State of the project - input needed)
On Fri, Jan 25, 2008 at 08:26:04AM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jan 2008, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I think:
>> http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/a_problem_with_tools/
>> is a big one that deserves attention. It's been a low-level grumble for
>> quite some time in various places, but it's getting louder. It's a
>> difficult problem in that it's a balance between tools that make DDs more
>> productive and the ease of treating Debian packages in a uniform manner.
> I completely agree that this topic deservers attention and thus I
> would like to start a discussion here. IMHO there is a need for putting
> patches against upstream source into a defeult place. The rationale
> behind this is that if you are using VCS for your packaging to enable
> effective group maintainance it makes no sense to store a complete
> tarball but just the patches. For instance in the Debian-Med project
> http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/packages/
> we agreed to store only the debian directory into SVN and have a
> get-orig-source target in the debian/rules file. To store the patches
> in the debian directory and apply them later dpatch and quilt are
> widely used tools and I don't know a better solution.
> What would you suggest to enhance the situation?
- Use a VCS with support for intelligent merging (svn and CVS don't have
this)
- Store all of the source, upstream and Debian, in the same VCS (better if
upstream uses the same, but if it has to be a clone of upstream then so be
it)
- Create feature branches for each of your independent patches that you want
to be able to keep separate over the course of package maintenance.
As a second runner up, quilt is ok by me. :)
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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