[Pkg-lyx-devel] Stop using quilt?

[Per Olofsson]

Sven Hoexter wrote:
> 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.

Well, yes, I agree it's convenient. The problem is that when you apt-get source
a package and just want to modify and maybe NMU, it's really a pain to have to
fight all the different patch systems.

But I also like quilt, I think it's a great tool. And it's a lot simpler than VCS's.

> 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.

I've started doing that with xdg-utils actually. And yes, I have my home
directory in git too :-)

> With our current way of
> using subversion I don't see it as an advantage.

Well, SVN is not a very good VCS. But to be honest, I don't know how to replace
quilt efficiently in git either.

> 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. :)

I don't think it would improve our workflow, I just think that it might be
easier for other people if we didn't use quilt. I tend to listen to what Joey
Hess says, as I respect his opinions much. He was also my advocate before I
became a developer.

But I'm OK with us keeping quilt for now. Hopefully there will come a solution
to the patch managing problem in Debian packages, and we can wait until then.

-- 
Pelle