Re: Behaviour of dpkg-source with "3.0 (quilt)" and VCS and automatic patches
On Fri, 15 Jul 2011, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 10:53:03AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > b/ modify dpkg-source --before-build to keep a trace of the fact that
> > it applied the patches (for example by creating
> > .pc/dpkg-source-auto-applied) and in that case have dpkg-source
> > --after-build unapply the patches so that we're back to a clean
> > state after a succesful build.
> > If the build fails, we'd keep the patches applied.
>
> That sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
FWIW, this is already implemented in git master.
> > But it still happens that those patches are generated[1] when the maintainer
> > did not expect any change at all. That's why we added the option
> > --abort-on-upstream-changes for maintainers who never wants dpkg-source
> > to auto-create a patch.
>
> For me, what's most annoying here is the use of the version number in the
> patch name. This means, for instance, that if the clean target modifies the
> contents (maybe by regenerating configure), each package version could
> create a *new* patch for something that should definitely be represented as
> part of a single patch.
If the clean target does something like this, you obviously want to add
the modified files to the ignore list with something like this
in debian/source/options:
extend-diff-ignore (^|/)configure$
The use of the version number was supposed to differentiate changes made
in each upload for example by successive NMUers.
Anyway, I have implemented my suggested change in a topic branch:
git clone git://anonscm.debian.org/users/hertzog/dpkg.git -b pu/master
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=users/hertzog/dpkg.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/pu/master
It now fails and suggests to call dpkg-source --record-changes to make
the changes permanent.
I would welcome some people trying it. Cf my message of yesterday to
debian-dpkg: http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2011/07/msg00021.html
> I'm inclined to think that --single-debian-patch is a more directly useful
> default (possibly without --abort-on-upstream-changes). It doesn't give the
> best results for patch naming and headers, but if the maintainer is actually
> going to put in the effort to do all that, I would assume they can change
> the default anyway.
--single-debian-patch has a really specific purpose of someone wanting
to always auto-generate the full patch because the changes are managed in
a VCS and not in quilt.
I don't agree that it should be the default. That said the naming of the
automatic patch is less important if the default is to go through
dpkg-source --record-changes since it requires the user to give a
meaninful patch name.
We could simplify everything and drop --single-debian-patch (just making
it an alias for the new --auto-record-changes) by always using a
non-versioned name.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Follow my Debian News ▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.com (English)
▶ http://RaphaelHertzog.fr (Français)
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