Re: New source package formats now available
Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I've considered using TopGit to generate a real quilt patch set, but
>> it's kind of complicated and I'm not convinced that the work required
>> to generate the exported patch tree even with TopGit is really worth
>> it. Given that, for packages currently maintained in Git, 3.0 (quilt)
>> is extra complexity over 1.0 that doesn't seem to be buying me very
>> much.
> Why not generate a single patch then instead of a patch set? If that
> single patch contains an header explaining why it's not split and where
> you can review the changes in a more friendly manner you can have all
> the other features of the new format and yet the the situation improve
> wrt to knowledge/advertisement of our debian-specific changes.
Generating the single patch out of Git is nearly as complex as generating
a patch series if dpkg-source doesn't just do it for me (as it does with
the 1.0 format). I know 3.0 (quilt) will as well (without any header),
but it doesn't really provide any functionality over 1.0 for this use case
and adds some extra complexity.
However...
> I would be ok to add support for this in "3.0 (quilt)":
> - add an option "--single-debian-patch" that could be set in
> debian/source/options. With this option dpkg-source would update
> debian/patches/debian-changes (instead of debian-changes-<ver>)
> - support a debian/source/debian-patch-header that would be used
> as header of the automatic patch (debian/patches/debian-changes in this
> case)
> How does that sound? (Thanks to mrvn who suggested me the ideas)
...I think this is a really good idea, particularly since I can understand
not wanting, in the very long run, to support multiple patch formats.
Seems like a fairly reasonable approach to me.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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