Re: tomcat5.5, 6.0 and version control
Hi
I agree with you in princible, but it depends on how responsive upstream
is and how bit the source tree is. Patches can be send to upstream
with both alternatives, so that is not a valid argument, i think. :)
I do not know how responsive tomcat is so this commend is on a general
level.
Personally I use to do the following:
* Create a directory debian/patches
* Place all patches recieved from other people there that is
applied to the source.
* Generate specific patches when needed and place them there
as well.
* Always work directly with the source tree, that means that
have a "normal" source tree where you make your changes and
debug from there.
* No special patch system to automatically apply patches, more
than the normal diff.gz patch system in Debian.
Why this?
* Unpacking of a source tar archive take huge amount of time for
big packages. I maintain vnc for example and that is about 46 MB
in gz format.
* Regeneration of patches are tedious when debugging.
* No need to regenerate patches when you recieve them in some other
format than dpatch can handle.
* You can submit patches to upstream anyway.
When can automatic patch system be useful?
* For small source trees.
* When upstream is very responsive.
* Lot of upstream releases.
* When lot of local changes.
When are automatic patch system not useful?
* For really big source trees. Unpacking takes too much time.
I imagine that tomcat is such a beast.
* Very few upstream releases.
Vnc release things every second year or so.
* When upstream is not responsive.
Vnc have no contact address at all. No where to send bugs
etc. The mailinglist is only used by users and not the
developers (or very seldomly at least).
I personally used the automatic patch system for vnc4 some
releases ago but it took me too much time to maintain this
so I switched, and I will not switch back.
Regards,
// Ola
On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 04:54:36PM +0100, Arnaud Vandyck wrote:
> On 11/14/06, Marcus Better <marcus@better.se> wrote:
> >Hi,
>
> Hi,
>
> >I'm working on squashing some ugly bugs in tomcat5.5,
>
> You mean upstream bugs?
>
> >and right now I've
> >just about had enough with the patch system. I have better things to do
> >with my time than regenerating patches and sorting out conflicts for every
> >little change. I feel that the complexity of the package has outgrown the
> >patch system.
> >
> >So I'm simply going to make a branch in svn and work in there, with the
> >full
> >source tree and no patches. (IMHO that is what version control systems are
> >for.) Then I will provide the result for review before uploading.
>
> Please, provide the result with the *original* tarball and a serie of
> patches so it's easy to isolate the patches. A good thing to do is
> report the different patches to tomcat's bugzilla for integration
> upstream.
>
> >(Aaah, I'm feeling better already.)
> >
> >Once this is done I would like to look at Tomcat 6, which is in alpha, but
> >we could make preliminary packages. However I'd like to have proper version
> >control from the start, and preferably a VCS with proper merging support.
> >Suggestions welcome, and also please tell me if you would like to help
> >packaging Tomcat 6.
>
> I don't like that way of working. I think we should only patch
> upstream when there is debian specific patches or for little things
> that upstream does not want to have in his/her tree. Else, for me it
> seems to be a fork. If you want to improve tomcat source code, submit
> patches to the tomcat project. The philosophy of Debian is: if we can
> enhance the software, enhance for *all* the community (so all the
> distributions also). You'll have a better impact if you send patches
> to tomcat's upstream than if Debian forks tomcat.
>
> I agree with you about the patching system, it's not easy to work
> with, but IMHO, Debian is not about doing software, it's about doing a
> distribution.
>
> I'd like to help with tomcat5.5 and tomcat6 but I'm a bit out of time
> at the moment. I hope to have more time in... January ;-) but I'm
> trying to keep up with mails and bugs.
>
> --
> Arnaud Vandyck
>
>
> --
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>
--
--------------------- Ola Lundqvist ---------------------------
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