Greetings: God bless you. Having a aspiration to contribute back to the Debian project by becoming a developer, adopting an orphaned package or two, such as xmailtool, I'm trying to work through building from gotten sources, and find myself with some missing bits of understanding as to exactly how a *.diff.gz is applied to the corresponding *.orig.tar.gz. I've tried various combinations of current working directories with zcat name.diff.gz | patch, and getting missing file errors on files that I can plainly see.
Anyway, I thought "I guess I need to pour through the manuals again, and more closely this time...", and, in response to the challenge in _Debian_Developer's_Reference_, chapter 2.1: "studied the hello source enough, buddy? :/", I ftp'ed from ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/frozen/main/source/devel the hello* files. So to my question: why are there two different names for the hello package files, when, apparently, there is only a version difference: 5095 hello-debhelper_1.3-17.diff.gz 643 hello-debhelper_1.3-17.dsc 87701 hello-debhelper_1.3.orig.tar.gz 4946 hello_1.3-16.diff.gz 605 hello_1.3-16.dsc 87701 hello_1.3.orig.tar.gz (Yeah, I know: I could have used dselect, but I momentarily forgot that... I actually used dselect to fetch it for my system at home...) BTW, I suspect I'll find my answers on patching by rereading the _Debian_Packaging_Manual_. But if any mentoring elder developer feels abject pity on a poor clue-challenged newbie wannabe, and deigns to drop me a bone, that'll be good, too :! In other matters, in reading the docs with xmailtool, I find that the authors are not actively maintaining the source, and do not find any site mentioning anyone else who is, so I've assayed to also become the upstream maintainer, and have sent a notice of intent to the authors, at the last known email address, and have started a page at http://www.koyote.com/users/bolan/xmailtool . Is this correct method? Or "way" too presumptious, having skipped some proper steps?
