Re: [Quilt-dev] [PATCH] Remember location of patches and series file

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hello Jean,

On Sat, 12 Dec 2009, Jean Delvare wrote:
> I don't like the feature because, once you realize that
> .pc/.quilt_patches can be a symbolic link, it becomes clear that you
> can make patches/ itself a symbolic link to wherever you like and
> you're done. No need to modify quilt.

Well, no. I a debian source package (format "3.0 (quilt)") all the files
come from an upstream tarball except the debian sub-directory which comes
from a debian tarball.

If we create a symlink called "patches" it will be seen as adding a file
in the upstream tarball and dpkg-source will complain that it doesn't know
how to "store" that change in a patch. Because any change outside of
debian is an upstream change that is stored in a new quilt patch
in debian/patches/.

Creating that symlink is not an option for me: while it's ok for
individual maintainer that prefer creating it instead of setting
QUILT_PATCHES, it's not a design that I want to force on everyone
by letting dpkg-source create that symlink when the upstream source
package might rightfully have its own "patches" directory.

I just want dpkg-source to be able to create some files in .pc
to "pre-configure" the directory so that the maintainer can use
quilt without worrying about that problem of setting QUILT_PATCHES.

If you prefer that we do create .pc/.quilt_patches as symlink, that's fine
for me but it seems useless because internally quilt is using an
environment variable and I don't expect that you would rewrite everything
to use .pc/.quilt_patches just to support such a feature.

> see is: "What if you have a directory in your source tree named
> 'patches', for example?", but as far as I can see this is a
> theoretical issue, not one somebody has ever hit in practice. And if

It's bad design, sorry.

> that it is equally possible that the source tree includes a file or
> directory named "series" as well, or worse: ".pc". Even the proposed
> patch can't deal with this case.

Well, by setting the variable by default, the series file would be
ignored, only the one in debian/patches would be used.

As for .pc, it's documented in the package format that it's reserved, it's
a dot directory, it's ok.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog