[Quilt-dev] misc. questions

[John Vandenberg]

Hi,

I have a number of questions and suggestions for 0.44 that I have
throw together; feel free to answer a few at a time and come back to
others.

1. should patches for review contain quilt.changes updates?  My
initial impression is that this would be a good idea, as the contents
of this file are part of the published package; but, it would hinder
re-ordering patches.  perhaps this can be avoided by adding a script
that generates a quilt.changes update from the patch header, to be
used prior to commit.

2. should the patch header be used for the cvs commit message?

3. should I start a Contributions FAQ file?  if so, in doc/ or the
base directory?

4. I often add features to quilt because I need to use them then and
there, and then months later on forget what additional patches I have
installed on that box.  Timestamps and version numbers are useless;
the only way I can deduce what it can do is to know the list of
patches that were applied.  does this sound like a reasonable addition
to development versions of quilt?

5. I also forget where I was up to with a workpit, and come back to it
wondering whether if I need to do a fork/refresh and diff the two
patches. I would like to add a status.in to tell me what the current
state of play is.  My thoughts were that it should display:

Patch: $(quilt top)
Status: (up-to-date|stale|missing)

$(quilt header)

The missing option would appear whenever there are changes against
.pc, but no saved patch.

It may also be useful for the status command to list each file in the
patch with its own status.

(btw, as you may have gathered, I have a brain like a sieve and a
tendency to leave half finished work lying around, so if anyone has
any other enhancement requests that assist the hypothetical user
coming back to an old workpit, I will happily implement it knowing
it's gonna save my arse one day)

6. I would like to add a shell.in, that opens a shell with patchfns
loaded, so I can trial certain operations that doesn't warrant
cracking open the source and adding a feature.  However, this command
could produce dire consequences in the wrong hands; is it ok to
install this?  should it issue a strong warning to the user?

7. Is it ok if I start moving the autoconf tests to separate files
into m4, and submit them to the ac-macro archive.

http://autoconf-archive.cryp.to/

8. In the TODO file is an entry "Add command to extract a header." 
Could someone comment on what is desired?  I would like to knock this
off if it is related to some changes I have been working on  As part
of the "patch parameter" series, I have updated quilt header to obtain
the header from any patch file, including if it is outside of the
series.

--
John