Debian patches to our mozilla-based applications

[Alexander Sack]

On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 10:44:25AM +0100, Mike Hommey wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been recently working on checking what patches are applied to what
> mozilla-based applications, so that we can better see if there are
> patches that are applied, for example, on icedove that should also be
> applied to iceape and xulrunner, etc.
> 
> I've been trying to make it as much automated as possible, so I have a
> shell script extracting data from the patches directory in an XML form
> and a set of XSLT transformations to aggregate applications patches
> information and make it a nice html table.
> 
> The result is here:
> http://web.glandium.org/debian/teams/pkg-mozilla/mozpatches.html
> 
> The patches are ordered by ascending numbers in their name (that don't
> show up because they are not necessarily the same on all applications,
> which happens for config, for example, in which case the number is the
> one from the first application I parsed, which was iceape)
> 
> This order is somehow good for iceape and xulrunner, which are using the
> same numbering, but adding icedove makes it kind of worthless.
> 
> I still need to merge identical patches that are not detected as
> identical, and track patches that should be identical but are not for
> some reason (older on a package and not on the others, etc.), and,
> biggest part, extract patch information for iceweasel.
> 
> If you have suggestions on presentation, please let me know.

Thanks Mike. Nice work.

First, how do you maintain the XML files? Do you use an automated tool
to generate them? Were is the documentation pulled-in from?

As a suggestion, it would be helpful to navigate to the patches
directly from that page. As a bonus it would be nice to select two
arbitrary patches and click a button "interdiff" to get the output of
an interdiff.

Anyway, the last feature is only of long term use, if we try to keep
maintaining patches/ independently for each app. But I think we should
try to unify the patches we use.

I am somehow unsure how to realize this, but maybe maintaining a
single patches directory for all apps would be great.

For instance we could use a directory structure like this:

 debian/patches/
                ...       // patches that are common to all apps
		          // -> later this would probably be the
                          // patches for xulrunner
 debian/patches/app1      // application specific patches

or we could decide (maybe a cleaner solution) to split patches by
component:

 debian/patches/browser
 debian/patches/calendar
 debian/patches/mail
 debian/patches/mailnews
 debian/patches/xpfe
(or 
 debian/patches/browser_*.dpatch
 debian/patches/calendar_*.dpatch
 ...
)
(fill in all components we have a patch for)

Then we could either distribute all patches for all apps together with
some helper that includes/excludes patches by application being build;
or we could provide some checkout/update script to pull only the
appropriate files from the repository.

 - Alexander

-- 
 GPG messages preferred.    |  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux **
 Alexander Sack             | : :' :      The  universal
 asac at debian.org            | `. `'      Operating System
 http://www.asoftsite.org/  |   `-    http://www.debian.org/