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Re: How to handle Debian patches



On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 12:07:43PM +0000, Vincent Untz wrote:
> [I'm not subscribed to debian-devel, so feel free to cc me if you want
> to keep me in the loop]
done.

>  + it also seems that some debian developers would prefer the VCS way
>    instead of patches.debian.org. Well, if all the debian packages are
>    maintained with the same VCS, and it's easy to browse this from one
>    place, then yes. Else, if I have to use git for $a, bzr for $b, svn
>    for $c, hg for $d, etc., this is going to be a nightmare from my
>    upstream point of view. (although it'd be fine, I guess, to have
>    $vcs_a for $distro_a and $vcs_b for $distro_b -- the important point
>    is that consistency to access patches for all packages in a given
>    distro is key for upstream people)

  We will never ever harmonize on one vcs in Debian. Don't dream of it,
it just won't work. Even Ubuntu can't do that (okay they use bzr a _lot_
but I know quite a few Ubuntu developers that use git instead so…).

  FWIW I agree that the .diff.gz is a terrible way of exposing our
modifications to the world, espcially since all is meld into that
(debian/ specific changes not meant to be merged upstream like packaging
stuff, or real patches that upstream should probably take). That's
exactly why while I'm doing most of my work in git, I try to export
patches in debian/patches sanely, and I usually also export a git
branch, trivially browsable through my git.madism.org gitweb, hence
without _any_ git knowledge, for upstreams to cherry-pick from. Sadly
not everyone agrees that serializing changes we do is the way to go, and
the latter (publishing my branch in a gitweb) isn't normalized, and
won't probably ever be, or not under this form.

  The sole thing that can work is that the source package is good enough
for everyone wanting to grok what is in our packages, because that's the
_SOLE_ thing everyone still uses in the end. Our source format is our
common point, it's the best place to make things like that happen.

-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O                                                madcoder@debian.org
OOO                                                http://www.madism.org

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