Re: How to cope with patches sanely (Was: State of the project - input needed)

[Moritz Muehlenhoff <jmm@inutil.org>]

Andreas Tille wrote:
> What would you suggest to enhance the situation?

Each maintainer may be familiar with his pet patch system, but for
archive wide work I agree the current approach is a mess and makes
security updates painful. Since it's unlikely to change anytime soon,
each source packages, which uses something else than a plain diff.gz
(which can be fixed transparently), should be mandated to have a
/usr/share/doc/PACKAGE/README.NMU, which describes how to deal with
the relevant patch system, especially:

- Through which hoops do I have to jump to create a patch? (dpatch e.g.
  is horribly counter-intuitive)
- Do I need to register the patch in 00list or another obscure place
  or are all patches in debian/patches applied?
- If I have to patch a file, which is patched in an already existing
  patch, how can I get a clean state to diff against?

(For dpatch and quilt this could be solved by adding a symlink to a
standard file provided.)

Cheers,
        Moritz