[ On Thursday, October 5, 2000 at 20:33:43 (-0400), mcmahill@mtl.mit.edu wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: pkgsrc reorg
> 
> On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, David Brownlee wrote:
> > 
> > > On Thu, 5 Oct 2000, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> > > 
> > > 	True, but how about putting all the patches into a single file -
> > > 	that would certainly save on inodes and disk fragments...

Yes PLEASE!  Besides making it easier to generate patches when creating
a package it also makes merging pkgsrc into a vendor-branch of a CVS
repository IMMENSELY easier too!

> > >    Maybe
> > > 	even gzip it.

definitely not, thanks....

> > Isn't that a step backwards?

I've always found the current mess to be a major step backwards!  :-)

> > It's been my experience that maintaining
> > the older packages which have many patches in one file is a real pain.

It all depends on how you do it I guess.  I've found that both with and
without the assistance of CVS it's much easier to produce patches in one
pass and thus dump them into one file.  People who tweak things bit by
bit until they appear to work might find this onerus, but I think doing
things that way is most onerus in the first place!

> I've found it difficult when updating a pkg when multiple files are
> patched by one patch file.  Sometimes some of the patches got incorporated
> into the program and others not.

Multiple patch files that patch the same file is true insanity indeed.
It makes any attempt to manually maintain package patches almost
impossible.

The only possible caveat on the last claim is where third-party patches
are fetched and applied.  I've made tweaks to my mk/bsd.pkg.mk rules
though to ensure that third party patches produce ".3rd-pre" and
".3rd-rej" files (i.e. instead of ".orig" and ".rej").  This way at
least I can still reconstruct the original and reproduce the diffs
without having to redo everything manually step by step.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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