[Pkg-Cyrus-imapd-Debian-devel] Moving cyru22 to use dpatch?

Thu, 19 May 2005 20:55:31 -0300

On Fri, May 20, 2005 at 12:37:14AM +0200, Sven Mueller wrote:
> I'm currently thinking that it might (most probably) usefull in the
> future if we moved all the patching of the upstream source I've done to
> use dpatch (or a similar mechanism given that dpatch has been orphaned)
> and keep the diff.gz clean in the sense that it only ever creates files
> in the debian/ directory.
> 
> Is this really desirable? If not: Why not?

It is desireable, as far as I am concerned.  The only thing you will get
some grief from is from autotools.  I usually keep all Makefile.am,
configure.ac/in and friends patched directly, and everything else under
dpatch.  

But one *can* have it all under dpatch, it is just a matter of building
stuff out-of-tree, and re-running autogen.sh.  In Debian it is quite
safe to do so, if you have tight build-deps.   But it does make
backports more difficult, an year down the road.

I was actually doing that to cyrus2.2, which is one of the reasons I
always had to start over when I spent some time away from it, and thus
ended up never uploading anything in an acceptable timeframe.

After *all* patches are in dpatch format, though, it is a breeze to keep
it up-to-date.

I seriously recommend changing the dpatch exec stub to do a patch
--dry-run -F0 and abort without messing up the tree if that fails,
though.

> In my opinion, it would make upgrading to future cyrus-imapd versions a
> lot easier.

Yes.  Had I done that in cyrus2.1, we would have had cyrus2.2 in sarge,
so you have my full backing behind a move to dpatch.

(this mail is a bit weird because right now my email connectivity is
pretty much screwed up).

--
  Henrique