Introductory mail

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Tue, Sep 30 2008, Martin Bähr wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 02:27:34PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>>         Not really. I prefer to have the source packages be unpackged
>>  even on a machine which does not run Debian, using just plain old tar
>>  and patch. Thus I tend to ship the  diff.gz as something that creates
>>  the set of bytes the package build was done from, and which is
>>  extracted easily without you having to have dpkg installed.
>> 
>>         I see the source package as something useful perhaps even in a
>>  non distro specific setting.
>
> indeed, they are. but exactly for working outside of debian it would be
> preferable to have the patches easely accessible seperately. i
> occasionally try to pick patches from other distributions when packaging
> for foresight because in the end we share most of the problems and
> patches for it. 

        In similar conditions, I prefer to pull from a public git repo
 than to compare patches to see what changed since the other guys last
 revision. With git it is trivial to see differences between
 branches. With a patch series that changes slowly from release to
 release, trackign changes in a patch from one release to the nhext
 becomes, for me, a nightmare.


> to work with a debian package i currently have to pull out the patch
> from the diff either by applying the diff to the source or by manually
> editing the diff file.

        That is just the first time. Say you take some patch, but modify
 it to remove stuff that Debian does that does not workl for your
 distro.

        In two weeks, I release the debian package again -- and most of
 the stuff has changed a bit.  How do you tell what the new changes are
 in this release, given that you already have taken the last set of
 changes?

        Comparing the quilt series from release to release would be
 unacceptable.  Does quilt provide an easy way to compare tow different
 versions of a quilt series?


> from fedora i can just download the patch from fedoras cvs, in fact, if
> i don't need to edit the patch, then i can just directly refer to the
> cvs url in conary recipes, thus making it very obvious where the patch
> comes from:
> r.addPatch("http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/cone/F-9/cone-gcc43.patch?revision=1.1")

        And when there is a new patch in CVS, how do you know what the
 incremental change was?

> so, making patches easely accessible would be really helpful for the
> exchange between distributions...

        Frankly, I would justr refer people to my public repo in these
 cases. 

        manoj
-- 
Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer and then you find
there is nothing in it. -- James Huneker
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>  
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