Debian patches to our mozilla-based applications

Loïc Minier lool+alioth at via.ecp.fr
Sat Feb 3 14:52:52 CET 2007


        Hi there,

 First, yeah, Mike's work is really nice.  Second, I think it could
 benefit even more projects than just the mozilla packages: simply
 exposing some meta-information about the patches on web pages would be
 a nice use case!  I suppose a lot of alioth projects such as pkg-gnome
 would be interested in exposing their patches on a web page for various
 reasons.  Meta-information could be stored in the header and cover:
 Debian-specificity, upstream status and upstream bug, first version
 with the patch, origin of the patch, etc.

On Sat, Feb 03, 2007, Alexander Sack wrote:
> For instance we could use a directory structure like this:
>  debian/patches/
>  debian/patches/app1
> 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
>  debian/patches/browser_*.dpatch
>  debian/patches/calendar_*.dpatch

 That's an idea, but I think it doesn't scale too well, especially for
 patch ordering problems, and it will also be tedious to use if you add
 a patch that touches two components for a reason (e.g. patching all
 Makefiles or something similar).

 What about coding the information you're interested in in the patch
 header itself?  E.g.:

# Debian-patch-Mozilla-Component: xpfe
# Debian-patch-Mozilla-Specific-To-Applications: iceape icedove
--- file
+++ file
<patch data>


 I've thinking for a while about adding meta-information to pkg-gnome
 patches which are in various formats (simple-patchsys, dpatch, and
 quilt) in order to automatically track which patches need forwarding.
 I thought this should be done with care in order to be reusable across
 Debian packages (and even across distributions!).

 But the work of Mike simply opened my eyes that we absolutely need to
 publish this to a web page!

-- 
Loïc Minier <lool at dooz.org>



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