quilt, cdbs, dpatch, but is there even simpler ?

[Charles Plessy <charles-debian-nospam@plessy.org>]

Le Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 11:31:06AM -0700, Brandon Philips a écrit :
> > > 
> > > I moved to debian/patches with dpatch.  Is this a reasonable solution?
> > 
> >   use what you like. I usually find quilt simpler, but really, I care
> > much about you beeing comfortable with it than me. You may want to
> > read[0].
> 
> Wow, quilt is much easier to use.  The new maintainer guide recommended
> dpatch but it sort of sucked, good thing I asked :)

Hi all,

I am really dreaming of a simple system which "just works", such as
having patches in the debian/patches directory, and having the rest
working automagically. Or a patch-available / patch-enabled system such
as in the apache2 configuration.

The easiest way to manage patches I know is cdbs, but I was not brave
enough to study wether it is possible to separate this feature from the
others. I read many times that quilt is simpler, but I do not find a
simple documentation on internet. For the moment I use dpatch, but is is
a slight work overhead since it is needed to convert patches to
dpatches, for a benefit which is questionnable : one could embed the
justification of the patch as comments in the code itself, after all.

Having a simple and straghtforward patch system would lower the bar for
new packagers, as well as open the way to have .diff.gz files which
would only touch the debian directory, instead of containing a mixture
of packaging instructions, code changes, and autoconf gizmo (another
Debian nightmare which I do not understand the benefit).

I hope that somebody will answer me that I overlooked the patch system
of my dreams and give me its name...

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
http://charles.plessy.org
Wako, Saitama, Japan