Hi!

Quoting a paragraph from:
http://lwn.net/Articles/283030/


Debian's packaging policy resembles that of most other distributions.
A Debian source package is supposed to contain a tarball of the
upstream source distribution, without changes. Any
distribution-specific patches are included separately and applied
when the source package is prepared for building.


Do we have a policy that all patches we apply in our packages need to be
included *separately*? (I couldn't find anything like that in our
guidelines, but maybe I missed it) And if not: Do we want such a
statement in our guidelines?


Background: I wanted to use grub as provided by Fedora on a FAT
partition. That didn't work properly, as the Fedora grub includes this
patch:

http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rpms/grub/F-7/grub-0.93-configfile.patch?view=markup

The main part of it (¹):

- .string "/boot/grub/menu.lst"
+ .string "/boot/grub/grub.conf"

That of course creates trouble, as FAT due to its 8.3 filemane
limitations can't store a file called grub.conf. Thus I had to build a
special grub where this patch wasn't applied. That was no big deal and
at least for me a easy thing to do.


In F8 and later that's way harder, as there is one patch (created from
git afaics) where all the patches that in F-7 were applied separately
are now merged into one giant 1,6 MByte big patch:

http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rpms/grub/F-8/grub-fedora-8.patch?view=markup
Building grub without that one patch of course is way harder now, as I
need to get my hands on that one patch and revert it after the giant
patch was applied. Not impossible, but way harder if one doesn't know
where to find that one small patch to revert it.


Do we care or do we want to ignore this (minor) issue?

CU
knurd

(¹) Side note: I think it's wrong to add such a patch, as differing from
upstream in things like config file naming just creates trouble and
confusion for everyone.


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On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 08:31 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Quoting a paragraph from:
> http://lwn.net/Articles/283030/
>
> > Debian's packaging policy resembles that of most other distributions.
> > A Debian source package is supposed to contain a tarball of the
> > upstream source distribution, without changes. Any
> > distribution-specific patches are included separately and applied
> > when the source package is prepared for building.
>
> Do we have a policy that all patches we apply in our packages need to be
> included *separately*?
None that I am aware about, except that we ask/encourage packagers to
use clean upstream tarballs.

As a consequence of this, we have a similar rule in effect.

> Do we care or do we want to ignore this (minor) issue?
IMO, we should.

> (¹) Side note: I think it's wrong to add such a patch, as differing from
> upstream in things like config file naming just creates trouble and
> confusion for everyone.
Agreed. Shipping customized tarballs, where an upstream is available
should be banned.

Ralf



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