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

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi,

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Jean Delvare wrote:
> You are ready and willing to change quilt to fit the specific needs
> of a custom software only you (Debian) are using. This is fixing the
> conflict in the wrong place IMHO.

There's no conflict... I just want to make it easier to use quilt
with a source package format that is using the principle of a quilt series
to manage a debian-specific patchset on top of an upstream tarball.

> And what would you do if a package happened to have a "debian"
> directory (or worse, a "debian" file)?

With the old source package format, it was a pain and we usually repacked
the upstream tarball. With the new source format, the debian dir/file is
replaced by the content of the debian tarball.

> You'd have a point here... if your proposed patch didn't do some
> magic trying to relativize paths. If .quilt_patches is supposed to
> be the exact file-based equivalent for the $QUILT_PATCHES environment
> variable, it should be copied verbatim.

Sure, that's fine for me.

> Reading http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=557623
> I seem to understand that once again this piece of code was written
> to workaround a problem in Debian's internal tools.

It's not working around, it's just adding a feature so that both tools
can be better used _together_. We have been using quilt for years without
that feature but those that do all have been creating a .quiltrc like
this:
for where in ./ ../ ../../ ../../../ ../../../../ ../../../../../; do
        if [ -e ${where}debian/rules -a -d ${where}debian/patches ]; then
                export QUILT_PATCHES=debian/patches
                break
        fi
done

I'd like to avoid this by setting up QUILT_PATCHES automatically thanks
to the new files in .pc.

> I might consider something like your patch if and only if:
> * The relative_path stuff is gone; this is complexity we don't need.

Ack.

> * Documentation is updated accordingly.

Ok.

> * The root finder algorithm is also updated accordingly; as discussed
>   with Martin a few days ago, looking for $QUILT_PATCHES no longer
>   works with your proposed change, you must also look for .pc in case
>   this is where $QUILT_PATCHES is defined. This won't be bullet-proof
>   even then, but it already wasn't and I guess it never really was
>   meant to be.

The root finder algorithm is after QUILT_PATCHES has been set from
$QUILT_PC/.quilt_patches so it's already working as expected, no?

Or do you mean that we should look for .pc in parent directories
too?

Once I have those answers, I'll try to come up with an updated patch
(maybe not very soon, I'm a father since a few days and need some time to
get used to my new life).

> This is all crying for a "quilt setup" command, isn't it?

What would be its interface ?

quilt setup [patch-dir [series-file]]

and it would create .pc in the current directory with the
given parameters for .pc/.quilt_patches & .pc/.quilt_series ?

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog