Re: Behaviour of dpkg-source with "3.0 (quilt)" and VCS and automatic patches

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> I have a very minor objection: I think it's aethetic clutter to add
> unnecessary file extensions (we're not DOS or Windows), and any decent
> editor should figure out that it's a patch from either the file format
> or the fact that it's in a debian/patches directory.

I am sympathetic to this view, and when there is a good reason not to
have a filename suffix (e.g. a program file) then I point out the
redundancy of such suffixes and advocate their removal.

But for many cases, it can be very useful that every file intended for
automatic processing in a directory to have a uniform known suffix. This
allows easily processing them with shell globs, ensuring that any
*other* files in that directory (e.g. temporary files or “I don't want
this file to take effect right now” files) will be ignored based only on
their filename, without need to depend on parsing their contents.

> But I don't feel strongly enough about it to do anything other than
> just write this message.

Likewise :-)

-- 
 \            “Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what |
  `\                mnemonic means, you've got a problem.” —Larry Wall |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney