Re: dpatch vs. quilt [was: Re: RFS: proxycheck -- link]
* Kevin B. McCarty [Sun, 29 Jan 2006 11:39:17 -0500]:
> Frank Küster wrote:
> > There are also other alternatives to dpatch; one is Debian-specific and
> > i keep forgetting its name, and there's quilt. The main advantage of
> > quilt IMHO is that it doesn't duplicate the whole tree when editing and
> > updating the patch, which can be time- and disk-consuming in large
> > projects. Instead it keeps a list of files for the patch one is editing
> > and only keeps copies of these.
That (speed), together with `quilt refresh` to get rid of fuzzyness
(perhaps dpatch has it as well, I don't know) have made me a fan of
quilt recently. Plus other goodies, like --no-timestamps.
With respect to speed, it must be that most people use it in small
trees, 'cause the couple times I've tried to use for some package of
mine, the source was not small and it was unbearable. I also found out
that the dpatch author was not quite well aware of this, since he has
/tmp in RAM, or so he said. But when prompted about the problem on
IRC, he said he'd consider copying the tree with hardlinks, which
should help.
> Out of curiosity, does quilt have a mechanism similar to dpatch that
> allows you to treat shell scripts as "patches"? My inability to find
> such a feature was the main reason I opted for dpatch over quilt in the
> Cernlib package -- I needed to move a bunch of files around within the
> source, and doing so with a pure patch system will result in huge and
> fragile diff files (two copies of each file to be moved, which breaks if
> upstream changes any of them!).
No, in quilt patches are patches, not scripts. :) Why don't you move
files around in debian/rules, anyway?
Cheers,
--
Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer adeodato at debian.org
Listening to: María del Monte - Que también es de Sevilla
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