[mirian@cosmic.com: Re: A Linux Elbows - flavors]
This is related to my recent post asking for people to poke holes in a
redesigned source layout.
If Mirian writes the implementation, would we want to use this?
Thanks,
--
Raul
----- Forwarded message from Mirian Crzig Lennox <mirian@cosmic.com> -----
From: mirian@cosmic.com (Mirian Crzig Lennox)
Subject: Re: A Linux Elbows - flavors
Date: 23 Dec 2000 15:31:18 -0500
On Fri, Dec 22, 2000 at 03:42:57PM -0500, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote:
>> Please, please, please take a look at the FreeBSD ports collection,
>> the anoncvs server and the cvsweb interface. THIS is how to do an open
>> source package collection without making life a living hell for outside
>> developers.
I responded:
>Mind suggesting how we should approach this, when many of our package
>maintainers don't have access to support remote cvs?
After thinking about this a bit, it's possible to accomplish the moral
equivalent without CVS, by using rsync (which debian already provides
for) and a relatively minor change to the source package system:
Change the debian source package system so that patches are correlated
with changelog information. One way this could be done (not necessarily
the best way, but it would work) would be to simply include a byte-offset
into the diff file in the changelog entry. This means that instead of
being a monolithic diff glob, the diff for package revision 'x+1' would
be the diff for package revision 'x', with the diff to get from 'x' to
'x+1' appended. Alternatively, every revision's diffs could simply be
kept in a separate file, though this would mean that some code would
need to be changed in the unpacking of source packages. But either way,
rsync would pick up only additional diffs if a previous source package
were already on the local disk, and it would be much, MUCH easier for
an outside developer like myself to maintain local changes to debian
packages.
I think such a change could be made compatible with the current format of
source packages; old tools would simply ignore the byte-offset in the
changelog, and new tools would know by the absense of the byte-offset that
they were dealing with an old-format source package.
Anyway... this is my suggestion. If you think it would be worthwhile, feel
free to propose this to anyone in the debian organization you think might
be interested; as a debian developer your words may carry more weight.
I think the actual code involved would be fairly trivial -- just a couple
of changes to the dpkg-buildpackage and dpkg-source... I'd even volunteer
to write the code if I thought people would use it.
--Mirian
----- End forwarded message -----
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