Arnd wrote:
> Actually, I was thinking of a different concept with a 'Replaces: tag,
Hm. As I understand it, it would be more something like a "Provides:"
declaration, it seems. Such a feature does not seem useless to me at
first glance (we already see aglomerations of patches, like FOLK,
which coule have make use of this), but I'm not sure it would be
something we can work with.
Let's look at your example:
| Patch-name: Debian base patch
| Patch-id: debian
| Architecture: all
| Kernel-version: 2.4.20
| Depends: ptrace, isdnbonding, binfmtmisc, ethernetpadding, ...
|
| Patch-name: Pre-patch 2.4.21-pre7
| Patch-id: patch-2.4.21-pre7
| Architecture: all
| Kernel-version: 2.4.20
| Provides: ptrace, ethernetpadding
Here I suppose the pre-patch is supposed to be applied first, and then
the application of the debian patch would only trigger application of
those dependant patches not provided by the pre-patch.
That's only fine _if_ the replaced patches are similar enough so that
any patch in the debian set, that would depend on those, can still
apply atop the new one. That is, if there are several revisions of a
given fix, we'll have to use versionned Provides: and Depends:, or
we're doomed. Not that it's impossible, but I'm not sure it's exactly
trivial to implement...
| Patch-name: AMD64 CVS snapshot
| Patch-id: amd64-20030417
| Architecture: i386, amd64
| Kernel-version: 2.4.20
| Depends: debian, patch-2.4.21-pre7, simicsfs
| Provides: aic7xxx
Here I suppose you should have swapped debian and patch-2.4.21-pre7,
or that simply wouldn't apply.
> Do you think that make-kpkg and dh-kpatches could/should be merged,
> making the dh-kpatches information evaluated by make-kpkg if available,
> or do we need changes beyond that?
They cannot be completely merged, since they work on complementary
stages of the kernel build. OTOH, gradually the kernel-patch-scripts
package is gradually going to factorise things that currently get
duplicated in all kernel-patch packages, and since this part of
dh-kpatches will work in the same stage as make-kpkg does, it may make
sense at some point to have a look at something like a merge of this
part into make-kpkg.
But since this is all about things yet to be written, we'll see later.
Regards,
--
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