Re: Best practices to refresh patches

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2020-05-09 at 23:43 BST, Jesus Cea wrote:

> PS: The original question is still out there: Is there any automated way
> to refresh the patches to avoid fuzzing?

Just run mkpatches.  Sure, it doesn't update the line numbers as that
can generate a lot of noise, but this usually isn't a problem, it will
fix the important things that will cause most patch failures.

If updating the line numbers is really important to you and there's a
case where it would make a difference, then it shouldn't be too
difficult to add a non-default option to mkpatches for it to update
them on request.  How's your Perl? ;)

As for the contributor guide, I think the main reason that there isn't
one is because we permit a lot of different ways for people to
contribute depending on their preferred method.  The important thing
is that we get a good quality submission - it matters less if it comes
in via GNATS, mailing list patch, GitHub pull request or issues, patch
direct to current maintainer, wip commit, etc.

Different developers also have different preferences as to how they
handle submissions.  For example I utterly detest GNATS and much
prefer GitHub pull requests, yet other pkgsrc developers have the
completely opposite opinion.  Thus in my brief guide to fixing
packages I linked to raising a GitHub issue:

  https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc/wiki/pkgdev:fixing

but this wouldn't be suitable for the primary pkgsrc documentation.

We should at least have something though, if someone is able to come
up with the right wording.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com