Introductory mail

[Guido Günther]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:27:13PM +0200, Martin Bähr wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 02:27:34PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >         Not really. I prefer to have the source packages be unpackged
> >  even on a machine which does not run Debian, using just plain old tar
> >  and patch. Thus I tend to ship the  diff.gz as something that creates
> >  the set of bytes the package build was done from, and which is
> >  extracted easily without you having to have dpkg installed.
> > 
> >         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. 
> 
> to work with a debian package i currently have to pull out the patch
> from the diff either by applying the diff to the source or by manually
> editing the diff file.
> 
> from fedora i can just download the patch from fedoras cvs, in fact, if
> i don't need to edit the patch, then i can just directly refer to the
> cvs url in conary recipes, thus making it very obvious where the patch
> comes from:
> r.addPatch("http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/cone/F-9/cone-gcc43.patch?revision=1.1")

Patches are easily accesible from within gitweb (using Vcs-Browser) when
the package uses git-dch to generate the changelog. Git-dch allows to
store the abbreviated commit id in the changelog so people can find
patches easily by looking at the changelog first:

libvirt (0.4.6-1) experimental; urgency=low

  * [e20d3d4] Imported Upstream version 0.4.6
  * [0c840ab] disable numactl
  ...

then using git-web:

   http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-libvirt/libvirt.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=0c840ab

Cheers,
 -- Guido