Re: Progress on Minix port of pkgsrc

[Klaus Heinz <k.heinz%junzehn.kh-22.de@localhost>]

Gautam BT wrote:

> 1) I am also trying to add support for the Minix compiler (ack). The main
> issue is that ack lacks a 64 bit type. So I am having to surround code that
> uses long long or uint64_t with HAVE_LONG_LONG macro (Roughly 3-4 places per
> package). Are these changes acceptable?

Patches should always be constructed with this aim in mind:
  pkgsrc should contain as few patches (ie. the contents of the "patches"
  directories) as possible.

This implies that patches are supposed to be fed back to the original
author(s) of the software whereever possible. In turn, this means
that good patches may be difficult to write because they have to fit the
tastes of the upstream authors in order to be acceptable to them (an
example is "simply removing some offending lines from a file" versus
"adding a new option for the configure.ac file").
Some patches may never be acceptable upstream, for various reasons, and only
those should be a permanent part of pkgsrc.

The case of the missing 64-bit type is a good example where the
patches should live only temporarily in the pkgsrc repository and get
integrated upstream so the software can build on Minix, independent
of pkgsrc.
 
ciao
     Klaus