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Date:      Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:39:02 +0100
From:      Michael Gmelin <freebsd@grem.de>
To:        ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Newbie maintainer, question regarding patches
Message-ID:  <845ACEFD-830F-4941-9EE3-F3CB35FD6200@grem.de>

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Hi,

I recently took over maintainership of the devel/ice port and trying to =
get familiar with the dos and don'ts of porting. In the past I =
contributed only by sending PRs, which would have been approved by the =
maintainer. Since I'm the maintainer now, will I still open normal PRs, =
which will then be taken by the committer? The Porter's Handbook seems a =
little bit thin on this (or I'm unable to distill .

Also I have an additional question regarding how to patch - as far as I =
understand, usually there should be one patch per patched file. I have =
the following situation changing the port:

a) I created a massive patch that enables the port to compile using =
modern compilers (gcc >=3D 4.7 and clang >=3D 3.0). Since this patch =
touches many files I was wondering if it wouldn't be better to keep this =
in one patch file instead of creating 20+ patch files which then have =
very little coherence (this patch fixes the same things in all files, as =
devel/ice violates the C++ standard in many places)

b) I also have another massive patch which touches another 20 files =
which enables some new security features in ice (the history of this =
patch is that I developed it at first and submitted it to the vendor, =
who refined it and sent it back to me). I might want to make this patch =
optional as well (using a dialog style menu to enable it). In this case =
it also seems like it would be better not to split the patch up to all =
that many sources, but keep it as one feature that's contained in one =
patch.

Especially when combining a) and b) (which both touch some of the same =
files and therefore will get more or less interleaved) it seems =
problematic (yet possible) to split them into many separate files.

So the general question is:
Is "one patch per file" a golden rule or are there exceptions in cases =
where one logical patch touches dozens of files?

Thanks,
Michael




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