On 06/01/2008, at 0:50, Roland Illig wrote:
Hi,I'd like to change the filenames of patch files, since the naming scheme patch-[a-z][a-z] doesn't give me enough expressiveness for efficient work.
We already had a discussion about this topic in June and July 2004:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2004/06/
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2004/07/
([change request] pattern for patch filenames)
The discussion revealed that there are some different opinions of
how patch files should be named, but arguments for a specific
scheme were rare, and suddently the discussion ended. We had these
suggestions:
1. Keep everything as is (patch-[a-z][a-z], one patched file per patch):
[pro] simple, easy, and it works. [pro] short filenames, viewable even on small screens. [pro] the order in which the patches are applied doesn't matter. [con] CVS history contains comments on many unrelated patches. 2. Filename based on the patched file, one patched file per patch: [pro] patch filename shows which file is patched. [pro] the order in which the patches are applied doesn't matter. [pro] CVS history contains only changes to this particular file.[con] the name of the patched file occurs three times: in the filename, in the "---" line, in the "+++" line (redundancy).
[con] there's a naming scheme to be learnt 3. Group functional changes into one patch file:[pro] the patch can be easily removed once the problem has been fixed upstream. [con] a file may be patched by multiple patches. The order in which the patches are applied becomes important.
I'd like to establish variant 2. (I don't want to displace variant 1, I just want to be allowed to use variant 2 for packages I maintain.) Other opinions?
Except that 3 makes it much easier to feed things back upstream, while 2 does not at all when you patch a single file for multiple different reasons (being configure the most common example).
To solve the order problem, we'd add a "series" file alongside the patches that lists the patch names and thus imposes order among them. Then it'd be trivial to use quilt to manage these patch sets, which is a pretty nice tool when you get used to it :-)
(But I agree that variant 1 is not the most appropriate.) -- Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv84%gmail.com@localhost>