How to cope with patches sanely

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>         I like the reduced work for each upload, and since it satisfies
>  the use cases of being able to present upstream with a pure feature
>  changeset;

It doesn't satisfy it completely. You can always generate a patch for
a pure feature changeset but you can't guarantee that all those feature
patches apply at the same time.

Let's say you have 5 feature patches, the upstream maintainer wants to
integrate 3 of them. How can you submit 3 patches that would apply one
after the other? You have to redo some of your integration work that you
already did.

That said, even with a pure quilt set of patches, you can't guarantee it
either. If one of the wanted patch has some overlap with one of the
non-wanted ones...

All in all, I think we do all exagerate the problems. In my experience,
most of the patches applied to a Debian package are relatively independant
of each other and inter-relationships is the exception, not the rule.

But if we can come up with a solution that handles perfectly
inter-dependant patches, that would still be great. :-)

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

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