Hi,

a time-consuming task when updating packages is to keep track of all the 
patches that have been created in pkgsrc. I've tried to record the 
situation for devel/cqual in a file called patches/status, which contains:

----
$NetBSD$

applied patch-aa 1.1
applied patch-ab 1.2
applied patch-ac 1.2
applied patch-ba 1.1
new patch-bb
new patch-bc
applied patch-bd 1.1
new patch-be
applied patch-bf 1.1
applied patch-bg 1.1
new patch-bh
applied patch-bi 1.2
# ... in src/libqual/quals.c
applied patch-bj 1.1
new patch-bk
applied patch-bl 1.1
applied patch-bm 1.1
# ... in src/libqual/location.c
new patch-ca
new patch-cb
new patch-cc
new patch-cd
----

Each line describes the state of one of the patch files, where the first 
word contains the current state:

When a patch file is created, its status is "new". After the upstream 
developers have been informed, its status is changed to "reported". From 
there it may either become "applied" or "rejected".

Patches that should not be reported upstream are marked "local".

There are of course problems when a patch is only applied partially. I 
haven't thought much about this.

Of course it is cumbersome to do all this by hand, so I'm thinking about 
some tool support for creating and managing this status file. But 
before, I'd like your opinions whether we want such a thing at all.

Roland