Re: [Quilt-dev] quilt and debian (was something else)

[Andreas Gruenbacher]

On Tuesday 24 November 2009 08:56:05 Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Greg KH wrote:
> > I don't understand the main problem here.  quilt relies on other
> > programs that have to run already that are written in C (bash, patch,
> > etc.)  So why would an arch not be able to build backup-files as well?
> 
> Building the C file is not the problem. The manual bootstrap is the
> problem because we build packages and not individual C files.
> 
> quilt as a source package build-depends on the following binary packages:
> Build-Depends: cdbs, debhelper (>= 5)
> Build-Depends-Indep: gettext, hevea, lynx, diffstat, perl, procmail
> 
> On the other hand, important packages like glibc or linux-2.6 have quilt
> in their build dependencies because they use it to manage the changes we
> apply on top of the upstream version.

Having quilt as a build dependency is just wrong.  I don't accept the 
bootstrap argument as a reason for slowing quilt pop down for everybody.

What do you use quilt for in those packages? If you use it only for applying 
patches, then that can be done easily in a short shell script as well. If you 
care, even creating the quilt metadata is really easy. (GNU patch does almost 
all the work anyway.)

Another option when using chroot environments or better for building would be 
to use quilt's patch-wrapper as a wrapper around GNU patch in those build 
environments: the idea is to leave the build process unchanged but to change 
the way how patch is invoked so that it also creates the quilt metadata. (The 
script may need an update and may need some Debian specific improvements.)

Thanks,
Andreas