Re: P.S. [mirian@cosmic.com: Re: A Linux Elbows - flavors]

[Brian May <bam@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Raul" == Raul Miller <moth@debian.org> writes:

    Raul> Huge monolithic patch files like this are just fucking
    Raul> useless, and the debian/changelog is no help because it
    Raul> doesn't cross reference the patches incrementally, as cvs
    Raul> does.

I like the method used in openldap (at least in woody), and now in
heimdal, and (to a certain extant) libpam-heimdal.

For heimdal, in particular, I found myself making so many completely
different and unrelated changes, I found it impossible to manage with
CVS 

Was this file different due to a upstream bug, or was it different
because I wanted to try and use installed Debian shared libraries, or
was it different because of changes I had to make for the FHS?

The problem with CVS is that I might be in middle of making one big
change, when I have to make a minor changes to other parts of the
code. So relying on tags and/or dates to distinguish between changes
won't always help. Perhaps appropriate use of branches might help, but
I don't think it is worth the effort.

So, for now I have dropped using CVS, and have a single patch file
which represents each problem. As an advantage, I can easily send to
upstream a single patch file if I think the problem should be fixed
upstream.

The only real dislike is the lack of tools to manage this setup.
eg. I would like tools (should be easy to write) that do simple
tasks like:

1. unpack source here, apply patches up to an including X, and make
copy using "cp -a" or "cp -al" (copying hard links is better but does
not work unless the program breaks the link; some don't, including
autoconf, automake, and my setup of vim).

2. diff new source with old source and save result as
debian/patches/<filename>.

3. Some way to upgrade to a new upstream version and deal with patches
that won't apply for some reason. (I find it very tedious to have to
look at each reject file to find out what went wrong. I don't always
understand the reject file either).

I have:

4. I script (specific to heimdal) that will automatically obtain the
diff required to update automake and autoconf files (heimdal requires
the CVS version of automake and autoconf in project/experimental, so I
probably can't depend on this package for woody).
-- 
Brian May <bam@debian.org>