How to cope with patches sanely

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 17:24:49 +0100, martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> said: 

> also sprach Florian Weimer <fw at deneb.enyo.de> [2008.03.01.1650 +0100]:
>> It does, if you ship the sources with the series applied.  AFAICT,
>> this is not what's usually done.

> ... or if the patches were automatically applied when the source is
> unpacked, which is where I think we're heading.

        Why do we have to settle on a quilt based source package, when
 my proposal meets all the requirements anyway? Why does it have to be
 one or the other?

        Why is the requirement not just:
 a) on dpkg-source -x; you get what you need to compile and build the
    package
 b) The monolithic diff.gz has additional information provided that
    shows the user the different lines of development that have been
    integrated into the Debian package
 c) This additional information should not need knowledge of an SCM or
    network access

        And let people figure out on their own how to make this happen?
 (Like, perhaps, teaching dpkg about the top few stacked patch
 mechanisms).

        Why standardize on tools instead of specifying results? Methinks
 that useless conformity comes close to foolish consistency, and I am
 opposed to hobgoblins.

        manoj
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Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
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