Re: New source package formats now available
On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
> Actually, I feel rather to convert my packages to 3.0 (native) + quilt.
> The way quilt is implied in 3.0 (quilt) doesn't seem to be helpful (to
> me).
Yay for reuploading the full tarball for each revision! I'd rather you
keep using 1.0 instead of doing this...
> If you want to really make proper use of it (like seperating into
> feature patches instead of one per upload) you need to have quilt
> installed anyway, and speaking of NMUs, people that just download the
> source, patch and upload will produce low-standard patches, most
> probably not following the DEP3 because dpkg with 3.0 (quilt) doesn't
> really offer what quilt offers. It feels a bit like the regression that
> svn brought on top of cvs with taking away the posibility to tag
> properly (but create tag-branches instead).
The automatic patch now features DEP-3 headers by default. The NMUer can
rename it and edit the headers easily. If he wants to create one patch
per feature, he can simply rebuild the source package after having applied
each patch.
For each patch:
- apply patch
- dpkg-buildpackage -S
- rename debian/patches/debian-changes-<ver> into something else
and edit its headers
- fix debian/patches/series
Note: this works only if quilt is not installed (or if you ensure
dpkg-source is called with --without-quilt which you currently can't pass
via dpkg-buildpackage).
I would certainly prefer using quilt directly but it's not required
if you don't have it installed.
> 3.0 (quilt) looks like a good idea, but it's still rough at the edges
> somehow. :/ And about not needing a README.Source for it, I don't see
It's new, it's just that we haven't developed the toolset around it. I
always expected that people would start developing new tools à la
devscripts to make it easier for some specific scenario.
And I'm including improvements that make sense based on the feedback that
I get.
> that because otherwise we wouldn't have the need for discussions like
> that, especially if we want to have proper DEP3 tagged patches. :)
Well, everything has a learning curve. It's normal to have to learn once.
The point of README.source was to document stuff that not all DD are
supposed to know. Knowledge of the new source format will be common
in the near future.
> It is causing troubles for people that are familiar with quilt and
> think they will be able to work with quilt with the source package when
> they dpkg-source -x it - which unfortunately isn't the case. Only when
> quilt is installed, but then, this is getting different results
> depending on the environment one has, and I thought this was always one
> of the big NO-GOs in Debian that we should avoid - and here we have it
> even intentional? Sorry that this doesn't make me (and from what I can
> see others too) happy :/
Well, people familiar with quilt have it already installed. And most
packages are built out of VCS with patches un-applied so it doesn't even
matter in most cases.
I have nothing against adding quilt to dependencies of dpkg-dev but I can
tell that I will get the same number of grumbles from other people equally
unhappy with that choice.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
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