Re: Lintian ERROR saying dpatch is obsolete
Martin Wuertele <maxx@debian.org> writes:
> * Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net> [2011-11-29 10:04]:
>
> (...)
>> > > > - Conditional application of patches. Some packages have patches that are
>> > > > only applied on a per-architecture or per-target-distribution basis.
>
> (...)
>
>> > > All of these can be dealt with by rewriting the patch so that it is
>> > > acceptable to upstream and applied and released by them.
>> >
>> > Care to explain how conditional per-target-distribution patches should
>> > be bushed upstream? Think of patches requried for debian/sid,
>> > debian/squeeze-backports, ubuntu/Oneric Ocelot and ubuntu/Lucid Lynx
>> > when it comes to build dependencies.
>>
>> Those belong in a version control system, not in a single source
>> package, which is only targetted at a single distribution. Such
>> things can be done very easily on per-distribution branches, e.g.:
>>
>> http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=buildd-tools/schroot.git;a=heads
>>
>> Such changes would typically only affect the Debian packaging and
>> not require upstreaming, but even if they did per-distribution
>> branches would still be the way to go.
>
> So the suggested solution is to put the data into an SCM somwhere
> outside the package (LP, git.d.o, $somewhereelse) instead of into the
> package where anyone wanting to deal with the packages is guarantied to
> find it (no downtime, no network required...).
Yes, that's how it should be done, even with dpatch. That you could do
otherwise (and still can, even with quilt, albeit it's thankfully harder
to do it) is unfortunate.
dpatch isn't, and never was meant to support these kind of hacks. It's
not an SCM, never was, never will be, and should not be used as one.
> Doesn't sound like an improvement to me.
It does, because you get proper version control, with branches and all
that stuff. It makes it much clearer what belongs to where, you get
versioning too, and so on and so forth.
A debian package is not meant to be the complete history of itself. It's
a version of a package. That you have different versions for the various
distros, and their versions, is fine, but it should NOT be in the same
source tarball. Use an SCM for that, they were meant to do that, dpatch
wasn't.
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|8]
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