Re: PERL5_PACKLIST and .orig files

[Robert Elz <kre%munnari.OZ.AU@localhost>]

    Date:        Sun, 23 Feb 2014 19:49:10 +0100
    From:        Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>
    Message-ID:  <20140223184910.GA15920%britannica.bec.de@localhost>

  | On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 01:38:18AM +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
  | > The question that ought to be answered is why pkgsrc is running
  | > patch in a mode that leaves .orig files around that then need removing.
  | 
  | So that you can recreate the patches.

wiz said the same thing ... but your average pkgsrc user has no
interest in doing that (and even if they did, the distfile is always
available, and the original files can easily be extracted from it
again).

By all means if this is really used often enough to be important,
add a developer option (target perhaps) that perserves the original
files (certainly when the patches are first being created and tested
keeping the original is useful, but that isn't generally done by
"make package" or similar...) but when things are advanced enough that
the PLIST becomes relevant, there is no real useful purpose in keeping
those things.

Again, why should patch be different than SUBST - they're both modifying
files from the distfile so the package will build correctly - in normal
operation, SUBST leaves just the modified file, and discards the
original (though I see it has a debug option to preserve the original,
which is a reasonable thing to have).   Surely patch should work the
same way?

My guess is that it is this way merely because NetBSD's patch defaults
to keeping backup files, rather than not keeping them (a reasonable
choice for how patch was originally used, in the 80's, but not so useful
any more) and that no-one was ever really bothered enough to add the option
to stop it.   After all, pkgsrc doesn't set the option to force te .orig
files to be created if it is running on a system, that defaults to not
creating them, does it?

kre