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Re: debian packages: single diff vs multiple patches (as in rpm)



Hi.

I suppose you have already found the most generic pointers like new
maintainer guide ans such.

Jay Berkenbilt wrote:
> As far as I can tell, a Debian package consists of a single source
> tarball and a single diff.  Is this right, or have I missed something?
> Coming from an rpm perspective, it seems to me that this would make it
> much more difficult to manage locally modified versions of packages.

Although patch management is not directly included in dpkg-source it is,
naturally, widely used by debian source packages.
Almost any of the larger packages apply patches (stored themselves in
the diff.gz) during package building, so you have plenty of examples.
There also are specialized tools, e.g. dpatch.

It is also not uncommon to make an orig.tar.gz of (possibly multiple)
upstream tarballs by putting them in a directory and tarring that. As
there is a distinct preference to ship pristine upstream tarballs in
some form or other, this is preferable than extracting them and tarring
the result.
(The first package doing this I could think of is sendmail, but there's
plenty of other, potentially better examples.)

Kind regards

Thomas

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