Re: Renaming files, patching, renaming files, unpatching, and 3.0 (quilt)

[Jasmine Hassan <jasmine.aura@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 8:49 AM, Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, 10 Oct 2012, Jasmine Hassan wrote:
>> For instance, I'm packaging Compiz 0.8.8, for MATE desktop. This, at
>> least initially, requires a lot of code substitutions, and quite a few
>> file/dir renaming. (ex.: gnome -> mate, gconf -> mateconf, metacity ->
>> marco, etc.) I use a home-brewed migration script to generate actions
>> for that.
>
> Compiz has not been forked but you have to patch it heavily because
> Gnome/Gconf/Metacity have been forked? Is that right?
>

Exactly, and gnome 2.x is no longer maintained, nor is Compiz 0.8.8,
last in release 0.8.x from April 2011
It was removed from testing, and unstable is still stuck at 0.8.4-1,
way behind the latest in the series from ubuntu, (0.8.6-whatever), and
its not longer being maintained in ubuntu either, in favor of 0.9.x
which is moving in the direction of unity. so ... no 0.9.x will work
for gnome 2.x / MATE

> In that case, I truly believe that MATE should fork Compiz as well
> and provide clean upstream sources (even if they are automatically
> generated by a script that does the renames and all).

That's what I'm doing. Wolfgang Ulrich has also done similar, for
redhat/fedora http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=276286

I synced all patches from latest applicable 0.8.6 in ubuntu that still
apply to 0.8.8, and debian, and a couple from fedora. I believe my
fork is superior to Wolfgang's, though I'm packaging for LMDE
(LinuxMint Debian Edition) / Debian Testing (what LMDE is based on).

>
>> huge, unnecessary patch. I might as well modify the upstream tarball
>> and use that as the orig, which, of course, is not proper.
>
> Why not?

In case someone decides to take over maintaining the package in
unstable (and that it returns to testing), will collide, and
apt-pinning is a pain for LMDE devs/maintainers.

>
> Were you intending to integrate your work in Debian's official compiz
> package? (Somehow I doubt that the maintainer would be interested to
> clutter his packaging to accomodate MATE)

like i said. it fell out of testing (removed), and unstable hasn't
been updated by maintainer since 25 Oct 2011
Couple small NMU's, last being 29 May 2012, and even then it is still
at 0.8.4-5.2

Someone needs to take over, obviously?

Cheers

>
> Cheers,
> --
> Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
>
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