Debian patches to our mozilla-based applications

[Mike Hommey]

On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 12:40:41PM +0100, Alexander Sack <asac at debian.org> wrote:
> 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?

The documentation is pulled in from the DP: fields in the dpatches.
While I fill them in iceape and xulrunner, it seems you're not doing
your homework in icedove ;)

The .sh script parses the dpatches and outputs an XML file. This output
is used to update the main XML that contains all the data used to create
the HTML page.
So, once initial data will be corrected, updates will be easier. It will
be possible, later, to have another script generating similar XML update
information from VCS logs/diffs (in particular, for iceweasel).

> As a suggestion, it would be helpful to navigate to the patches
> directly from that page.

I think too.

> As a bonus it would be nice to select two
> arbitrary patches and click a button "interdiff" to get the output of
> an interdiff.

Not for today ;)

> 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.

I think it would be a good idea to share the patches in some way.
Though, Eric seems to still be opposed to dpatch for iceweasel... and 
we all don't use the same repository or even VCS. I don't know how we
could manage such an heterogenous setup.
That's why I came up with the HTML table idea, actually...

Mike