Re: [Quilt-dev] [press] X debian maintainers switch to quilt (and like it)

[Martin Quinson]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2005 at 11:30:22PM +0200, Jean Delvare wrote:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> [Martin Quison]
> > Here is a good new for quilt:
> > 
> > http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravityboy/17175.html
> > 
> > That's a bit more burden on my shoulder since it looks like I'm not
> > free anymore to mess up my package, but I'm happy anyway.
> 
> Yup, this is great news. I never heard about "dbs", and I don't exactly
> get how the debian build mechanism is supposed to interact with quilt,
> but the guys seem to be more than satisfied with what quilt offers.

dbs is a crufty system unfortunately widly used within debian. You have your
patches and the original tree. The primitives are apply/remove any patches
or edit a given patch.

The difference with quilt is that the only way to edit a patch is to copy
your whole tree away, apply the patch on the copy, edit within the copy tree
and when you're done, refresh the diff by comparing both tree and erase the
copied tree.

It is less error prone than quilt (you're sure your changes will land into
the patch, no need to declare which files you want to edit beforehands), but
... I dunno. I always felt it a bit rusty. Concepts are not as clear as in
quilt, with the serie you navigate up and down and such. It's also much
slower because of this tree copy.

At least, that's my feeling. But when I consider that only 21 packages
debian are using quilt for their build time patching needs while 61 use dbs,
I think that either their's a magic I didn't understood in dbs or we're
slowly catching the good old dbs up ;)


Oh, and I realize that I didn't say in the first post where I've found this
link : we've made it into the Debian Weekly News:
http://www.debian.org/News/weekly/2005/32/ (search for quilt on the page)

Maybe those numbers will change in the next days/months ;)

Bye, Mt.

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