How to handle Debian patches

[Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo]

Quick thoughts on this:

1. Using any kind of SCM is good. No need to explain why, but even if
you don't mantain the package with any co-worker or team, it will allow
you to review changes.

2. Which SCM?
IMO, any distributed one, as they can manage branches easily. Git is the
best suited to this task, but also bzr can do the job. SVN was good as a
first approach to this world, but I think that is now getting obsolete
for what we want to achieve.

3. Should patches be made available also in plain text?
Yes, that will allow better reviewing and also pulling from upstream.
This will allow also creating patches.debian.org easy.
The problem here is that when using a low cost branch SCM (as git),
people tend to manage everything in topic branches and then make a final
merge, and ship that. This implies a hughe diff.tar.gz will be
generated, which is not optimal.
What I think should be done is to provide some tools in devscripts that
will handle this gracefully. You have a tool that will create a branch
for every patch you want to create (like quilt does, but with in a
different branch), you update those branches, and when you have it done,
you merge all branches (this could be automated keeping something like a
debian/patches/series file). When you create the package, text patches
will be generated and shipped.

Perhaps the latter is something that is being addressed by dpkg format
3.0, but I cannot find any documentation about it.

Cheers,

-- 
Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo
   jsogo at debian.org
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