Matt Zimmerman wrote:
On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 12:25:01AM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
If Debian treated our upstreams this way, I'd be suprised if we ever got
any patches accepted upstream.
Debian does, in fact, treat most of its upstreams precisely this way.
Debian publishes a large portion of its changes primarily in the form of
monolithic diffs relative to upstream source. The last time I saw figures,
the usage of dpatch, cdbs, etc. was rising, but not yet the standard
operating procedure.
I know it has been said before, but that is not true. For packages with
active upstream, I always send individual patches upstream. For packages
like mysql-admin, or mysql-query-browser, there is no dpatch, etc. used
because that would be inefficient. Upstream is very fast at fixing
things and the few, small patches that there are, can be fixed by hand.
For vast majority of cases, the huge .diff.gz patch is for the /debian
directory and sometimes to update the config.sub and config.guess files.
I don't think upstream would wade though .diff.gz files anyway. Huge
Debian patches like that just make the work of the maintainers, not
upstream, more difficult.
Low usage statistics for dpatch, cdbs, etc. don't imply that upstream
doesn't get manageable patches.
- Adam
PS. We already saw that a fork or derivative of upstream can warp into
something that will waste a lot of man hours to port with the Apple's
browser (derivative of Konqueror). Their huge patch cannot be easily
incorporated to the new version of Konqueror meaning that Apple, not
KDE, will be wasting a lot of their time porting that patch to the new
versions of the browser. Similarly for non-Ubuntu specific changes, it
is in Ubuntu's interrest (not necessarly Debian's) to have those patches
accepted in Debian. I think this is especially true for those critical,
base packages.
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