Introductory mail

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Tue, Sep 30 2008, Stéphane Glondu wrote:

> Martin Bähr wrote:
>>>         I see the source package as something useful perhaps even in a
>>>  non distro specific setting.
>> 
>> indeed, they are. but exactly for working outside of debian it would be
>> preferable to have the patches easely accessible seperately. i
>> occasionally try to pick patches from other distributions when packaging
>> for foresight because in the end we share most of the problems and
>> patches for it.
>
> Besides, providing the patch series even in the Debian package makes it
> easier to be adopted by someone else: it gives a "clean" start to
> someone who already has his own workflow and/or doesn't like the
> original maintainer's one.

        Only if you like working with patch series, and prefer to lose
 all the information that the original VCS contained. I prefer to see
 the whole history, not just a snapshot, when I am joining a development
 effort. 

> I find it quite unenviable to adopt a package
> for which the source package is just one giant .diff.gz, because it
> means either learning potentially elaborate tools to extract the
> individual patches, or manual splitting... For this, the new source
> format based on quilt seems just great.

        This is a strawman, really. The options are not the giant big
 diff vs quilt (equally horrible, IMHO). The options are 3.0 (quilt) vs
 3.0 (git). I would have gone for the 3.0 (git) format myself, except
 that it does not support submodules.

        The quilt format is the least preferred, for me, since it loses
 all the history. Given that, I am not going to go out of my way to
 support it. If topgit makes it simple, perhaps.

        manoj
-- 
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Wm. Shakespeare,
"Henry VI", Part IV
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>  
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