Hi,

in many packages the patches directory contains a bunch of patches doing
various things. Some patches are necessary for building the package, some
add nice litte features, some fix security issues etc.

However one doesn't know about that without deeper investigation. From
looking at the code it often isn't easy to see what the patch changes and
why it was changed. The cvs log messages have more details about that, but
it is always an extra effort to look them up.

It would be nice to have something like "make describe-patches" which lists
all patches and what they are supposed to do.

With this you could immediately check e. g. if the fix for a recent
vulnerability is already part of the package. It also makes it easier to
decide which patches are no longer needed when updating a package.

Comments?
I think this would make pkgsrc a great deal more userfriendly.

Bye, Chris