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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