Public SourceMage Discussion List

["Sergey A. Lipnevich" <sergey AT optimaltec.com>]

Quoting "Andraž \"ruskie\" Levstik" <ruskie AT mages.ath.cx>:

> 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:

Great idea.

> * 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'd rather have SEQ-TYP-NAME-P.diff (TYP:=[enh|fix|sec|oth]). The
reason I want
to see type in the name is because it's the kind of metadata that it's easy to
come up with. Other stuff (description, bug ID) can go into HISTORY if it's
available. I also think patchlevel should go last because I'd like
similarly-named patches to be grouped together with default sort order. the
final result will be that it'd still be trivial to add a patch file without
editing it and add a comment in HISTORY as usual.

Also, I'm sorry but I really don't like the idea of not using this naming
convention as Arwed suggests. Most of our patches are temporary, they come and
go quite often. For short-term fixes like that, proposed naming convention is
really good. For long-standing patches, we can still put whatever metadata
necessary into patch file itself, this option was always available.

To follow the idea of defining groups of patches and using them to ask users
what patches they want, I'd simply group them by NAME. One can separate
patches
with the same name by SEQ or TYP.

Finally, I also propose to never use the last digit in SEQ except where really
necessary. This limits available number of patch sequence numbers to about a
hundred, but that's still a lot. So, numbers typically in use would be 010,
020, etc. Kind of like line numbers in the old BASIC programs :-).

Sergey.