How to handle Debian patches

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 08:07:38PM +0200, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> >> Someone recently posted an example of this. IMO we should write a DEP
> >> on patch management and standardize those headers. And probably enforce
> >> their usage for patches on sensitive packages (lintian checks?).
> It would be nice if dpkg-source would automatically create a header
> template if missing and fork an editor whenever it changes a
> patch. Maybe add a comment section with a diffstat of the last changes
> that will be removed when exiting the editor for quick reference while
> describing the change.

I don't think we need such an integration at the dpkg-source level,
lintian checks are more than enough IMO. Take for examples the huge
amount of dpatch-es we have in Debian. Until a few months ago they were
basically *all* not commented, with a boilerplate description in dpatch
header. Then lintian started complaining about missing descriptions and
a lot of people [1] started commenting them. The same approach would
probably work for "3.0 (quilt)" dpkg format, as long as the matching
lintian test exists.

Cheers.

[1] I haven't made any statistics, this is an empirical analysis from my
recent experience: in the past all dpatches I stumbled upon uncommented
patches, including packages of mine, my recent experience show the
contrary.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science ............... now what?
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