Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Mon, May 15, 2006 at 03:38:42PM +0200, Andraž ruskie Levstik wrote:
> With my recent work on smgb and smbsd I've found that we have a rather
> incosistent way of handling patches so I was doing some brainstorming on the
> issue(with input from others) and this is what I came up with:

I like the general idea, comments below.

> * a directory patches in the spell dir would hold ALL the patches
> * a format for patch filenames would be defined
>   an example: 001-2-mypatch.diff
>   arbitrary:  SEQ-P-NAME.diff
>   SEQ: sequential number from 000-999
>   P: patchlevel
>   NAME: a name for the patch
>   That's for the filename

I wouldn't encode those in the filename, and I wouldn't use sequence
numbers. This is with thoughts about a possible future auto-patching. We
discussed this on irc once, but I don't remember all details, here's
what I do remember:
- all metadata about the patch is encoded in special comments, the
  filename is arbitrary
- instead of sequence numbers, use dependencies to order patches
- define a patch-group field, this is for future autopatching to be able
  to switch patch groups on/off depending on other settings in the spell

> * Comments in patches should be defined
>   an example:
>      ***START OF DIFF FILE***
>      ## Description: What does this patch do
>      ## BugUrl: Url to the upstream filed bug about the patch
>      ## Type: [enh|fix|sec|other]
>      THE_PATCH
>      ***END OF DIFF FILE***

Good idea.

> * If possible ALL patches should be applied in PRE_BUILD

Agreed. There's also the (very unusual) use-case where a patch gets
applied to system-files or something similar, e.g. the firefox
initialization patch that gets applied after install. These patches
should either be left in the main spell dir, or have a metadata setting
defining them as special.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org