Re: Breaks in lenny
On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 04:22:10PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> Russ Allbery wrote:
> > I understand that you and a few other DDs feel that way, but you appear to
> > be outnumbered at the moment.
>
> By whom?
The XSF really likes quilt. We're interested in other options that
interface better with git, but the last time I looked they were all
somewhat suboptimal.
We're forced to carry a fairly large patch stack that deviates from a very
active upstream. Having a clear and separate patch stack makes this job
significantly easier than if we simply kept the patches applied at all
times to our tree. Large patches that cover several files are hard to
track, and over the years their justification becomes fuzzier. Having them
cleanly separated makes it trivial to deal with them. As for other patch
systems, we migrated away from dbs because its design simply took too long
to get work done. The initial upload of the 6.8 Xorg package to the archive
took three times longer than the 6.9 upload because we were using dbs
instead of quilt. dpatch suffers from the same design issue.
Simply put, because we're dealing with a very large patch stack on a very
large, complicated, and continually changing codebase, quilt makes our job
significantly easier, and allows us to actually deliver the software at a
reasonable pace to our users. For smaller packages, especially those
without so large a patch stack, I see less justification for something like
quilt, but for us I don't really know how we'd get along without it.
- David Nusinow
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