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

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Tue, 24 Nov 2009, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> Having quilt as a build dependency is just wrong.

It's not wrong for Debian. It's the right thing to do if the build process
requires it.

This might change in the future now that we have a source format "3.0
(quilt)" which is able to apply a quilt series without quilt.

> 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.

It could, but that's not the case currently. Packages using quilt have
patch/unpatch targets in our debian/rules makefile and they basically
contain "quilt push -a || [ $? = 2 ]" and "quilt pop -a || [ $? = 2 ]".

>  If you care, even creating the quilt metadata is really easy. (GNU
>  patch does almost all the work anyway.)

Care to elaborate on that second part?

How stable are the quilt metadata and what do you mean by "easy"? I should
look up the patch wrapper you're mentionning probably.


Anyway, if we clean up the patch to propose the shell variant as an
alternative to the C variant with a configure option to use it, would you
accept it?

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog