Re: [Quilt-dev] Quilt 0.60 is coming

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Raphael,

On Thursday 23 February 2012 08:42:35 am Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hello Jean,
> 
> On Wed, 22 Feb 2012, Jean Delvare wrote:
> > If anyone has fixes pending, now is the right time to commit them.
> 
> Can you look into some of the patches available here?
> http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/quilt/0.51-1

I'm all for merging distro-specific fixes upstream. I still have a 
couple patches in openSUSE that should certainly go upstream too. It 
takes time to get right, tough.

> Among the relatively safe and should be mostly OK, there is:
> - ensure-manpage-has-correct-patches-dir
> - fail_on_missing
> - return2
>   I believe this one is a very old regression no one cared to fix.
> - check_SERIES_exists
> - patch-wrapper_do_depend_on_proc
> - override_mail_sender_in_testsuite
> - mail-signature + no-signature-test
> - mail-from-locale
> - unset_posix_strict_conformance_variables
> 
> More invasive but would still be nice to have under some form
> are 2 new features:
> - shell-subcommand
> - dep3_headers
> 
> (Maybe it's best to keep the last two for 0.61.)

It's definitely too late for new features in 0.61. What's more, new 
features aren't something I'll pick myself on debian.org. If you think 
these new features are of general interest, then you should actively 
submit them upstream. Oh well, same would hold for fixes too, ideally.

WRT to the fixes in the first list, please understand that even fixes 
which look simple may need some discussion and adjustments when it comes 
to merging them upstream. Locally, you only care about getting things to 
work now in your context. Upstream, you care about things working 
everywhere and in a maintainable way.

For example, ensure-manpage-has-correct-patches-dir works for you, but 
it relies on quilt internals which aren't documented and could change, 
so I am reluctant to take it as is. It could break in the future, and 
the fact you need to rely on internals suggests we're missing a clean 
interface which may be useful for other use cases too.

For 0.61, I would like to concentrate on a small number of fixes and get 
them right. Say:
* ensure-manpage-has-correct-patches-dir
* unset_posix_strict_conformance_variables
Reason for such a short list is that 0.61 already contains a fairly 
large and intrusive change (the backup-files rewrite), plus release date 
is close and I'll be on leave for several days until then.

Please post ensure-manpage-has-correct-patches-dir to the quilt-dev list 
and we can discuss the best way to fix the problem.

unset_posix_strict_conformance_variables was already submitted a long 
time ago, this lead to a discussion, the last post being:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/quilt-dev/2010-01/msg00024.html
So it has already been reviewed, I asked for changes which Martin agreed 
with, but never re-posted. If this is a workload issue with Martin then 
maybe you can do it. Or if you can't, tell me and I'll do it. It should 
be quite straightforward from what I recall.

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare
Suse L3