Re: Building a software toolchain that works

[David Arroyo]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2022, at 11:35, Maxime Devos wrote:
> Why skip downstream patches and snippets?

The spirit of the workflow is to enable someone to easily contribute
a patch to an upstream project. With that in mind, I assumed that
our downstream patches would not be accepted by the upstream project,
because they are specific to how guix works. Otherwise, someone would have
submitted them to the upstream project, and they wouldn't be downstream
patches anymore.

Taking the dovecot-pigeonhole example that I used, one of the snippets
removes the rfcs from the source directory for licensing reasons.  If a
contributor accidentally included this change when they sent it to the
upstream, it would distract from the discussion of whatever they wanted
to do.

Of course, many of the changes are necessary to build and use the software
with guix, as you say. And it is trivial enough for the contributor
to scope their patch to the files they actually modified, rather than
whatever the snippets and patches performed. I'm not opposed to including
them.

David