Bug#250202: Alternate proposal

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@grep.be>]

On Sun, Jun 12, 2005 at 01:06:10PM +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
> There are essentially two ways to use patch systems like dpatch: In
> debian/rules have 'clean' depend on 'unpatch' or on 'patch'.  While the
> standard way is to depend on 'unpatch', if you make it depends on
> 'patch', then all patches are applied by "dpkg-source -x" and you don't
> need the 'patched' target anymore. The cost on implementing the
> 'patched' target is higher than fixing the 'clean' dependency.

I disagree. If the semantics behind 'patch' in dpatch already implement
what the 'patched' target would require, then all that is required is to
add a rule to a makefile which says

patched: patch

and there you go; there's no high cost to implement it this way. This
rule can be added to a debian/rules file, or (better yet) to the dpatch
include files (which would fix it everywhere). If there is no target
that already implements the required semantics for 'patched', then there
indeed is a cost to implement it, but this cost will exist either way.
I don't see how the cost to implement it this way would be higher than
requesting the 'clean' way.

I agree that having a tarball in the unpacked source is not a good idea
anyhow, but the proposal already discourages that (and motivates this
discouragement).

Am I missing something?

-- 
The amount of time between slipping on the peel and landing on the
pavement is precisely one bananosecond