Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 14:43:34 -0400 From: Will Andrews <andrews@technologist.com> To: FreeBSD Ports <ports@FreeBSD.org> Subject: New patching policy proposal Message-ID: <20000514144334.D82488@argon.blackdawn.com>
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Hi,
I've been thinking about how ports handles patches, and I've decided that
it may be prudent to change our policy about how patches are made.
It seems that many active development projects would be extremely happy to
implement patches to their source code. Some reasons why we should:
1) We won't have to change our patches every time they update code.
2) Their users can now build CVS snapshots out of the box, without
having to apply OS-specific patches.
3) We can reduce repository bloat by removing patches as they are
integrated into the distributions.
These reasons seem enough to me to implement a new policy on ports
patching. Note that this is a proposal/idea-type thing and not something
I'm forcing on you. It's just food for thought.
When source code patches are made, we should use #ifdef (or #ifndef)
__FreeBSD__ to select particular code sections for use under FreeBSD. If
this is done, we can try implementing a script or somesuch that will send
patches to development teams (based on Author email address links in
pkg/DESCR) that are ready to be applied to a certain distfile. This will,
hopefully, greatly reduce turnaround time in getting patches removed from
our repository and into distfiles.
Of course, not all patches are source code patches. We also have Makefile,
configure, shell script, etc. patches. We can adopt different plans for
each kind of diff. Then, say somebody updates a port. A script that runs
(nightly? TBD) every so often will check the ports that have been changed
recently to see if any patches were added. Then it'll look up the Author
email address if available and automatically send these patches to that
email address, requesting a return reply to the port's maintainer as well
as ports@FreeBSD.org, in case said maintainer is inactive.
What does everyone think on this one? Granted, it will take some time to
convert patches to conform to this sort of standard, but I'm sure that if
this is implemented, it will save a fair amount of time quadruply on
developers', committers', users', and maintainers' parts.
Respectfully,
--
Will Andrews <andrews@technologist.com>
GCS/E/S @d- s+:+>+:- a--->+++ C++ UB++++ P+ L- E--- W+++ !N !o ?K w---
?O M+ V-- PS+ PE++ Y+ PGP+>+++ t++ 5 X++ R+ tv+ b++>++++ DI+++ D+
G++>+++ e->++++ h! r-->+++ y?
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