Re: How to cope with patches sanely
On Sat, Feb 02, 2008 at 10:26:52PM +0100, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> Bah that's the worst reason I ever seen to not use a DVCS in Debian.
> Please look at the debian packages with patches, and please tell me how
> many come with a comment about what the patch do. Please start with the
> glibc if you don't know where to start. Then please resume the
> discussion about how having patches series make them more commented.
I was't arguing that everyone *shouldn't* be forced to use a DSCM. I
was arguing against the proposal that everyone be *forced* to use a
DSCM, and moreover a the same DSCM. Whether it is git or hg or bzr,
forcing everyone to use the same DSCM is a *bad* idea because it makes
it harder to do the right thing.
Yes, it is quite possible to create patches that are horrible using
quilt or dpatch. You can write Fortran code in any language. :-)
But it requires more advanced skills using a DSCM to create good,
upstreamable patches than it would using something simple like quilt.
So again, lest I be misunderstood, using the quilt format is good. If
people want to use a DSCM, great; they can use many different DSCM's
many different ways to maintain a patch queue. We should not force
people to use a DSCM, and not a specific DSCM, regardless of whether
it is git, hg, bzr, or arch, just because we think DSCM's are cool.
(They are, but that's not a good reason for force everyone to
standardize on a single DSCM. :-)
And I think it is a much better idea to encourage people to spend
their time working on good, upstreamable patches, than to tell them
that the need to learn some specific DSCM.
- Ted
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