On Wed, 2008-08-20 at 12:29 -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > Why? Why should the Debian Maintainer care about the monolithic > > patch as applied in Ubuntu (perhaps also cluttered by several > > changelog entries about merges that have happened, or rebuilds). Is > > it not best practice to send those patches relevant to Debian to bugs > > in the BTS, as separated patches? If this is done, to whom is it > > useful to track the patches independently, so long as the patches > > remain easy to maintain? > > I think this is a misleading question: it is /not/ easy to maintain patches > that are jumbled together in a monolithic diff, because even if it's easy > for the person who created the patches (which is likely to change over > time), it's not necessarily easy for $random_other_ubuntu_developer who > comes along afterwards. Even the most innocuous-seeming of patches can > become head-scratchers over time if they aren't accompanied by appropriate > metadata (description, + some sort of bounding box saying which bits > belong). And yet, upstream development proceeds by editing a single huge monolithic diff (NULL->BRANCH_TIP) :). The key difference IMO is that when you have a bunch of patches that have not yet been reviewed, its likely that some will be accepted, and some not - and its harder to detangle those two sets after the fact. But making incremental changes is no harder with a monolithic patch than a set of itemised patches - and in some respects a monolithic patch is easier. > So for *Ubuntu's* benefit, I believe our best practices should be to use > some sort of patch management whenever patching upstream sources, not just a > monolithic diff. (Again, I think this can be either VCS feature branches or > an in-package patch system, whichever is easier for the people doing the > work.) Agreed. -Rob -- GPG key available at: <http://www.robertcollins.net/keys.txt>.
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