Re: How to cope with patches sanely
Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi> writes:
> As someone who's occasionally done some bug fixing to random packages,
> I'd really like to see some solution that allows us to mandate that the
> following sequence must work for all source packages:
>
> dpkg-source -x foo_1.2-3.dsc
> cd foo-1.2
> sensible-editor *
> sensible-editor debian/changelog
> dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc
>
> In other words: dpkg-source must unpack sources that can be directly
> edited and then dpkg-buildpackage will build a new, modified package
> that can be uploaded.
>
> If it's an NMU, then the package's maintainers can get the NMU'd version
> and include any changes in it in a way that suits their workflow.
This work flow simply doesn't work with our current source package format
and a patch management system. Requiring this to work *with the current
source package format* essentially means outlawing using patch management
systems to manage Debian packages. That's why this proposal is
controversial.
(No, this doesn't depend on whether one applies the patches in the clean
target. Consider the NMUer modifying a file that's also modified by two
patches.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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