Re: RFC: dpatch - past, present and future
Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> Hi,
>
> On Tue, 16 Aug 2011, Gergely Nagy wrote:
>> As for the future: I still believe dpatch is a temporary solution, and
>> that better tools exist now. Therefore, it is my long-term plan to
>> slowly deprecate dpatch, and eventually make it gracefully leave the
>> archive.
>
> How do you plan to do this?
>
> I imagine you could print out a warning during the build process
> when dpatch is invoked. It would point to some documentation explaining
> the recommended alternatives...
>
> You could also update the package description to discourage people to use
> it for new packages.
I don't want to make it spew out deprecation warnings, those are too
tempting to ignore. Updating the description, filing wishlist bugs with
patches, and providing upgrade paths for the most common cases is The
Plan. Along with an entry in debian/NEWS.
Something like a dpatch2quilt thing. While I haven't verified it yet,
I'm fairly sure most dpatches out there actually use the default
template, which is trivial to convert to quilt, preserving metadata and
all.
I expect arch-specific dpatches to be the bottleneck in migrating away
from dpatch, but I haven't started going through all the build-depending
packages yet.
> FWIW, we managed to get rid of 2/3 of dbs build-dependencies by filing such bugs:
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=hertzog@debian.org;tag=drop-dbs
This is a good idea, thank you!
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