[Pkg-shadow-devel] Policy for patches in the sid branch

[Christian Perrier]

Yesterday evening, I have worked a little bit on a small "policy"
document for handling patches in the sid branch in Alioth's CVS.

Please remember that the first goal we will have is isolating all
Debian-specific patches as "dpatch" patches so that later steps are
easier to achieve.

This is mostly done now, and the sid branch reflects it.

Alexander and I have confirmed that using it and applying all itsQuoting =
Nicolas Fran=E7ois (nicolas.francois@centraliens.net):
> Hello,
>=20
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 11:23:49PM +0200, Jonay Gomez wrote:
> > Program chfn does not work as documented in its man page.
> >=20
> > The man page says any normal user can update, for his own user accoun=
t,
> > the "fullname" part of the GCOS field.
> >=20
> > That is not true in Debian-Woody for the chfn command and the "fullna=
me"
> > part of any normal user account GCOS field. (I don't have Debian-Sarg=
e
> > here but it is trivial to try whether this bug is there too or not.)
>=20
> On woody, the end of the chfn man page indicates that "The file,
> /etc/login.defs, defines some configuration options that affects how
> chfn operates, especially for non-root users."
>=20
> In fact, /etc/login.defs contains a CHFN_RESTRICT variable which permit=
s
> users to change their own Full Name field (you just need to add an 'f'
> there).
>=20
>=20
> Note: the Sarge man page is even clearer:
> "A normal user may only change the fields for her own account, subject =
to the
> restrictions in /etc/login.defs.  (The default configuration is to
> prevent users from changing their fullname.)"
>=20

patches lead to the exact same source tree than what we have currently
in the Debian archive (4.0.4-31sarge2).

Now, we have to establish a policy for patches naming because the
debian/patches directory contains various patches from different
families.

Here is the policy document I wrote, which you'll find as
debian/patches/README.patches. Please read it before adding patches
there.


Small intro to the system for numbering the patches here...

-The 0xx series of patches are patches isolated from the latest
 version of the shadow Debian package not using dpatch in order to
 separate upstream from Debian-specific stuff.

 NO MORE PATCHES SHOULD BE ADDED IN THESE SERIES

-The 1xx series are l10n patches to upstream 4.0.3. As upstream has
 adopted Debian translations, it is very likely that these patches
 will become useless when we will have synced with upstream

-The 2xx series are patches for manual pages translations. These are
 also very likely to have been used by upstream as well, but they may nee=
d
 more careful examination later (for instance, the French man pages
 translation which includes the use of po4a)

-The 3xx series are patches which have been temporarily applied to=20
 Debian's shadow while we *know* they have been applied upstream as well
 These patches should NOT be kept when we will sync with upstream

-The 4xx series are patches which have been applied to Debian's shadow
 and have NOT been accepted and/or applied upstream. These patches MUST b=
e kept
 even after resynced with upstream

In short, while we are working towards synchronisation with upstream,
our goal is to make 0xx patches disappear by moving them either to 3xx
series (things already implemented upstream) or to 4xx series
(Debian-specific patches).



--=20