Patch metadata (Was: Plan for tomorrows (20080424) FESCO meeting)
Colin Walters
walters at verbum.org
Thu Apr 24 12:00:44 UTC 2008
On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 2:17 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Colin Walters <walters <at> verbum.org> writes:
> > The problem I'm trying to solve is when people collaboratively
> > maintain a package, you want to know when e.g. updating to a new
> > upstream version what the upstream status of patches are so you know
> > whether to expect to see them in the new tarball.
>
> Why do you want to make this mandatory then? Some packages have only one
> maintainer, some have multiple maintainers who have managed to handle this
> issue just fine.
In those cases, to help encourage people to file patches upstream.
Also, even if a package has one maintainer now, it might have a
different one a year from now.
> It's fairly easy anyway to figure out whether a patch has already been applied
> upstream: try building with the patch, if it fails with "patch reversed or
> already applied" in the build.log, drop the patch, make force-tag, resubmit.
That's a dangerous algorithm; a patch can still apply even if, for
example, upstream committed a different fix for the same problem in a
different area. Having a bug link there is going to help diagnose
that.
Really, it's one comment above the patch, and it's just a SHOULD.
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