[Pkg-lyx-devel] Stop using quilt?

[Sven Hoexter]

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 01:06:41PM +0100, Per Olofsson wrote:

Hi Per,

> Now that we need to patch the lyx source again to get it to use xdg-open, I've
> been thinking about perhaps skipping quilt. Several people on d-devel have been
> expressing concerns about patch systems adding unnecessary complexity to
> packages. And since our diff from upstream is so small, I don't think we need
> one, SVN should be enough for managing our changes. What do you say?

I've to agree that we're at the moment in the favorable position to have a
very small delta to upstream code wise but I'd prefer to stay with quilt.
Maybe you just good me kind of addicted to using quilt for patch management
instead of giving the task to the VCS so that I'm now a bit biassed.
IMHO it's a lot easier to add patches and remove them later on again with
a tool dedicated to the patch management instead of using the VCS. When you
know the package because you're working on it might feel not realy intuitive
but when you're looking at a package from someone else it's a lot easier
to walk through a patches directory instead of fighting a diff.gz mixed up with
packaging and code changes. I've felt the pain with tclcurl and mysql which
got NMU'ed several times before I took them over with regenerated autofoo
stuff in the diff. It's been nearly impossible to track down the reason for
all the changes in the diff.gz. Ok might be a rare case but I think it's an
advantage of a patches directory.

If you go the Joey Hess way of life and put your life into the VCS and even
recreate the .orig. from it while preserving the integrity it completly 
makes sense to me to track everything in the VCS. With our current way of
using subversion I don't see it as an advantage. Ok I hope I didn't open
pandorasb box at this point and I'll start to learn how to use git next
week but maybe it would be an advantage and I'm still missing the whole joy
of versionb control. ;)

So I'd like to keep quilt but if requirements change I'm absolutly ok with
changing the tools and adopting a different workflow. If you feel that it
would improve the workflow to keep the upstream changes within the repo feel
free. :)

Cheers,
Sven
-- 
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