Re: How to handle Debian patches
On Saturday 17 May 2008, Joey Hess wrote:
> George Danchev wrote:
> > Then comes even more, even Ben Laurie (as he writes in
> > his blog) with all his aggression missed to find the debian's pkg-openssl
> > VCS repo [1] unless he has been helped by someone at some point. I'm not
> > against the VCS repo (I myself use some for my packaging), I just claim
> > that you can expect that random upstream developers and random debian
> > users know about it, they need instead extremely simple and stable
> > interfaces to access the changes to their upstream source currently found
> > in Debian archive, and we already have that for years.
>
> The openssl package is missing a Vcs-Svn field. If it had one it would
> be pretty easy to find its svn repo.
I agree if we assume that Ben is willing to have that particular VCS installed
or there is a simple web interface (most do) to the repo. What could be of
great boredome for poor Ben and other possibly sharp eyes is that they should
look back in the history to find out what patches has been applied to what
source tree or export the debian's HEAD and diff it against the latest
upstream source they have (please I don't need examples how various VCS'es
rock comparing btw repos;-). Then again, we end up having all these logically
separate changes (if any/many of them) in a combined fashion. If there were
clearly separeted diffs in debian/patches/ is would be much easier for peer
reviewers to take a look at them without the help of VCSes and their web
interfaces.
> I think it's about time to file mass bugs on whatever packages are left
> that use version control and lack the fields.
I agree.
P.S. I don't blame openssl packaging, since I know how much valuable work has
been done for Debian by these people.
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