Re: How to cope with patches sanely

[Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au>]

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> Lars Wirzenius <liw@iki.fi> writes:
> 
> > 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.
> > [...]
> 
> 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.

Yes. However, I entirely agree with Lars's proposed requirement that
the described workflow should work on every Debian source package.

So, either an improved source package format is contrived (and
implemented, and tested, and adopted, and becomes reliable) to allow
the above workflow with (some subset of) patch management schemes, or
people should use VCSen instead of patch management schemes.

IANADD.

-- 
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Ben Finney