Debian contemplates patch management [LWN.net]

Debian contemplates patch management

Posted May 21, 2008 10:46 UTC (Wed) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406)
In reply to: Debian contemplates patch management by tzafrir
Parent article: Debian contemplates patch management

> Are all Fedora packages maintained in a central CVS?

Yes, that's the only way to include packages in the distro, as *all* packages are built in
koji ( http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/ ) from the sources in cvs.

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Debian contemplates patch management

Posted May 21, 2008 16:09 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

/me points to http://packages.qa.debian.org/findutils again
(it actually redirects to http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/findutils.html )

Here you can find all the information about the package. Including logs from the build
servers.

A package is rebuilt on build servers after it has been submitted by its maintainer. The
maintainer may maintain it in a version control system or may  write each and every new
version using butterflies. But once the maintainer uploads the candidate version to Debian, it
gets into the archive. This does not take a centralized VCS.

The package in that example is maintained in a separate subversion repository. It would still
be possible to use that even after other maintainers start using better methods such as
svn2.0, git, bzr and super-duper-future-vcs.

In fact, isn't the input to koji a source RPM?

You are still looking on this from Debian developer's viewpoint

Posted May 21, 2008 17:26 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Here you can find all the information about the package. Including logs from the build servers.

I don't need logs from build servers. I don't need links to "svn2.0, git, bzr and super-duper-future-vcs". What I (mainstream developer) need is simple way to see what patches were applied to the source. Fedora's CVS makes it trivial. Debian's control center is much harder - it's as simple as that. Case to the point: after all this hoopla with openssl how can I get list of patches in this important package? With Fedora - it's trivil: find your package in big list, click on it's name and get the list of all patches. You'll probably want to do two additional clicks to see when patches are actually applied in build process, but it's always the same scheme, it's always simple and easy. Debian's approach is flexible, powerful and... error-prone. Each package can have it's own VCS, it's own patch management system, etc - not so easy to just find the list of chnages.

Debian contemplates patch management

Posted May 21, 2008 18:15 UTC (Wed) by cyperpunks (subscriber, #39406) [Link]

> In fact, isn't the input to koji a source RPM?

It can be, however not in this case. 
Package is built from spec file and sources in cvs. 
koji builds the source and binary RPM.