Re: How to cope with patches sanely
Charles Plessy kirjoitti:
> Le Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 11:51:05PM +1100, Ben Finney a écrit :
> > I'm *not* happy to need to run some target with arbitrary commands
> > in the 'debian/rules' file, just to allow me to examine the source.
> > A big part of the reason for unpacking the source could be to find
> > out what's in there *before* executing any part of it.
>
> I do not know if it would be reasonnable to extend the scope of the
> discussion to third-party packages. For the packages distributed by
> Debian, there are quite many safety guards that should make people
> think that it is not unsafe to run 'debian/rules patch' (for the
> moment it has not been proposed to go through another mechanism).
Hmm, does dpkg-source need to automatically apply any patches at all? It
could just detect that a patch system is in use and inform the user
that there are some patches which can be applied by
running "debian/rules patch". This information is just to help users;
technically it's irrelevant.
To me it seems quite clear that some kind of "debian/rules patch-new" +
edit source + "debian/rules patch-save" round is needed to make
non-maintainers' modifications easy when the package utilizes a patch
system. Modifications need to act nicely with the patch series and what
those modifications actually are must be marked somehow; hence my
suggestion about patch-new and patch-save (or similar) rules. This
keeps them from being specific to any particular patch system and
non-maintainers' don't necessarily need to learn new patch management
tools. Of course such rules can be helpful for maintainers' too.
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