Re: svn management, git, etc
On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 07:30:14PM +0000, David Nusinow wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 07:04:28PM +1000, Drew Parsons wrote:
[...]
> > Like you, I tend to feel keeping explicitly separate patches makes for
> > a cleaner solution when dealing with upstream source the size of
> > X.org. Otherwise you've got to rabbit through the entire debian
> > diff.gz file to try to find what we changed from the upstream source.
> > Keeping separate patches makes it simpler to push particular fixes
> > upstream, I think.
>
> I agree. I think quilt has worked out extraordinarily well for us.
This issue is currently discussed on debian-devel in the "Centralized
darcs" thread. Ian Jackson has valid points (IMO). I also experienced
some trouble because of patch systems: I co-maintain the script which
extracts l10n material from source packages to generate statistics at
http://www.debian.org/intl/l10n/
This script extracts PO files from tarballs, and apply .diff.gz. It
works pretty well, but cannot deal with patch systems. It is indeed
very difficult to know which patches are applied, and in which order.
Not to mention that tarballs-in-tarball source packages make this
task even more difficult.
The only safe way to do it would be to build the package, which consumes
way too much resources. So when someone complained that a PO file
listed on these pages had already been patched in the Debian package,
I decided to ignore packages which use a patch system, because I could
not find a realiable way to extract l10n files. That is unfortunate,
but I see no better solution at the moment.
I use patch systems for some of my own packages, so am not against their
use, but we must realize that external people have valid arguments
against this use.
Denis
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