On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Eric Gillespie wrote:

> Shouldn't this be on tech-pkg?  Feel free to quote me there...

Yes.

> Adam Ciarcinski <adam@pulstar.man.szczecin.pl> writes:
>
> > Would it be possible to inform the developer(s) of the changes
> > made to their programs in NetBSD packages tree?  In regular
> > basis?  For every package?
>
> I do this for my packages.  I object to automatically mailing
> patches to the upstream maintainers, though.  Some patches only
> make the package work in pkgsrc, they are not general-purpose
> patches.

I agree that not all patches should be submitted back. For example, we
patch many Makefile.in and configure (but not configure.in, configure.ac,
or Makefile.am that developers use).

It would be nice to have the time to be able to have fixes add
portability.

Another problem is that some packages are old and no longer maintained.

> For example, i hack subversion's build-outputs.mk to allow me to
> build the various components separately.  This way, not everyone
> using the pkgsrc subversion packages has to have python, perl, or
> apache installed.  This patch would only annoy the upstream
> authors, as it breaks the normal build.

I don't use subversion (yet), but that seems like something that the
subversion authors could consider.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/