Hi! Some of you may have heard of this ancient beast called 'dpatch'[1], some of you might have noticed that it's been recentishly orphaned[2], and that someone (hi!) intends to pick it up[3].
The past ======== My involvement with dpatch goes back a loong long time, and I feel somewhat responsible for it, even though it was meant to be a relatively short-term transitional thing until the archive starts to allow multiple patches. Obviously, it wasn't as short term a solution, because as of this writing there are 809[4] source packges build-depending on it still. Nevertheless, it hasn't been touched since 2009, and only saw a couple of bugfixes since the end of 2007. At the same time, it accumulated a fair number of bugreports[5]. (And that list is already shorter than it was a couple of days ago, when I started to triage dpatch bugs) The present =========== Even a package that's meant to be temporary deserves better, so I took up the task, and triaged the bugs, and prepared a new version[6] that can be tested. It fixes 18 reported bugs, out of the 31 that is still open. The rest are marked wontfix at the moment. Now, why on earth am I writing all this instead of just going ahead and uploading, and enjoying the incoming BTS spam? Good question, dear reader, and I'll promptly get to the point! Back in the previous decade, a tool named 'dpatch-get-origtargz' was added to the package, which was supposed to find a way to get some kind of upstream source: either by checking a few directories, or via apt-get source, or by trying to do something with the watch file. At the time, this worked remarkably well, and everyone was happy. But in this decade, the tool is broken and bleeding from many wounds. So many, that I opted to drop it completely: there are better and more flexible solutions to achieve a similar goal: debian/rules get-orig-source being one of them, debian/README.source and similar being another option, along with version control systems, and Vcs-* fields. However, this had the consequence of "slightly" altering dpatch-edit-patch -b's behaviour: it used to call out to dpatch-get-origtargz to fetch sources. Now, it doesn't. I would like to have Your opinion, whether this is acceptable, or whether I should reintroduce said tool (except that it would attempt to apt-get source first, followed by debian/rules get-orig-source, and fail afterwards, instead of trying to be needlessly clever)? There's also a couple of interesting changes in the updated package, which I would love to have more comments on: * dpatch comes with a DH7+ sequence now, and one can do "dh $@ --with dpatch". I'd love to have more testing on that, and opinions about it too. * dpatches that don't do anything clever (ie, they're really patch -p1 files, using the standard template) will reset the timestamp of all patched files to the same timestamp, provided the lsdiff utility from patchutils is present. My question here would be whether patchutils should be promoted to Depends for this feature? Or - $deity forbid - should this behaviour be made optional? Or is it fine as it is, if I add a note about this behaviour to the manual page aswell (it's alreadin in debian/NEWS)? Furthermore, there's a couple of bugs in the BTS that are marked as wontfix, yet, I'm not completely convinced that's the right thing to do. So if anyone feels up to it, the following issues could use a few pairs of eyes: #400092, #400897, #342768, #397290. The future ========== As for the future: I still believe dpatch is a temporary solution, and that better tools exist now. Therefore, it is my long-term plan to slowly deprecate dpatch, and eventually make it gracefully leave the archive. However, seeing that this temporary solution has existed for nine years already, the deprecation will be of similar speed, I imagine. Therefore, I set a personal goal to remove dpatch by 2017, which would be wheezy+2 or so. 2017, because it's been about 6 years I last touched dpatch, and that number seemed like as good as anything, as goal when I want to touch it for the last time, and lay it down to have a well deserved sleep. Closing notes ============= There's quite a lot of changes in the version I prepared[6], if you have a dpatch using package, or simply feel like helping me, please test it, break it, and report bugs. Thank you! Links ----- 1: http://packages.debian.org/sid/dpatch 2: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=562697#14 3: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=562697#23 4: grep-dctrl -F Build-Depends "$1" -s Package \ /var/lib/apt/lists/*_Sources | sort -u | awk '{print $2}' | wc -l 5: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=dpatch;dist=unstable 6: http://madhouse-project.org/algernon/dpatch/2.0.32-preview/ -- |8] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/878vqt6was....@luthien.mhp
