Re: How to handle Debian patches
On Saturday 17 May 2008, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Fri, 16 May 2008 23:27:03 +0300, George Danchev <danchev@spnet.net> said:
> > On Friday 16 May 2008, Joey Hess wrote:
> >> Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> >> > I totally agree that we need to make our changes more visible. In
> >> > the openssl case, the patch in question is inside the .diff.gz and
> >> > you don't notice it in the unpacked source package. I tend to give
> >> > a look to what's in debian/patches/ when I rebuild a package but
> >> > not to what's in .diff.gz only.
> >> >
> >> > To me this one proof more than even when VCS are used to maintain
> >> > packages, our source packages must clearly identify the Debian
> >> > patches that are applied.
> >>
> >> You're insinuatiog that a VCS does not allow easily browsing and
> >> examining patches, and I just don't buy it.
> >
> > This is true, but not always handy. What you might buy is that the
> > upstream or resp. debian user is not supposed to know for your kind of
> > VCS (having it installed, etc) and where to find your VCS repo -- a
>
> I find this to be true for quilt too.
No and no. I'm not talking about quilt or any particular debian patch system
used. Upstream developers and/or random Debian users don't even need to know
one to read the diff files supplied by diff.fz they already downloaded from
ftp.d.o... and this is the simplest way possible for them to see what changes
has been applied to their particular upstream source tree.
> How does one extract what
> the 057th patch does, without examining all the leading patches up to
> that point? Linearizing features and intermixing integration changes
> along with feature-sets is something I have always found confusing.
>
> > ftp'ing of diff.gz or apt-get source pkg should be enough to get the
> > *clearly identified patches* to the upstream source tree.
>
> I find a quilt series to not fit the bill very well. On the
> other hand, creating ./debian/topics/foo/ with a git-format-patch
> series for each branch in there might be doable -- but then, these
> individual patches might not apply cleanly over each other.
Again, I'm not talking partucular patch-sys, as a packager you can use
arbitrary VCS to store your packaging, but you can't assume that upstream
developers and random debian users to follow you. See above.
--
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB 2003-03-18 <people.fccf.net/danchev/key pgp.mit.edu>
fingerprint 1AE7 7C66 0A26 5BFF DF22 5D55 1C57 0C89 0E4B D0AB
Reply to: