[Pkg-zsh-devel] Submitting Patches:

[Axel Beckert]

Hi Jesse,

Jesse Hathaway wrote:
>    1. Will you accept patches that provide backwards compatibility for
>    building the latest package on previous version of Debian?

Depends. IIRC the current package doesn't build on earlier versions
due to texinfo incompatibilities.

If you have a simple fix for that so that it builds on both, Debian
Unstable and Debian Stable (and maybe even Debian Oldstable), we may
include it. At least I'm not against being backwards compatible unless
it takes a lot of work and doesn't give any other benefit.

>    2. Why does the source code repo include the entire zsh source?

Because we basically just work on the git repository. That way we can
work without having to care about having the correct zsh upstream
source tar ball unpacked.

>    Is this a typical practice for debian packages?

Yes and no.

Yes, it's common to have the upstream sources also in the packaging
repository. See the man page for git-buildpackage, git-import-orig and
friends for more information and pointers to the reasoning.

No, it's not (yet) common to have upstream's git commits also in the
packaging repository. The most common (but surely not the only) way is
to import the upstream sources into the git packaging repository with
git-import-orig.

But since we use a rebuild upstream tar ball without the documentation
(which contains different configuration file paths than used in
Debian) and rebuild the documentation at package build time, the git
repository is basically our main source for the package and the
.orig.tar.gz tar balls are build from that. The more common way is the
opposite direction.

>    What is the best way to submit packages given this method?

Depends on which part of the package you want to patch:

If you solely patch stuff under the debian subdirectory, git-formatted
patches or a repo to pull from are probably the best.

If you only patch upstream source code, a patch to be included under
debian/patches/ is probably the best way. We though prefer if these
patches are suitable for upstream inclusion, too.

Hope, this helps.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
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