Hertzog: The secret plan behind the "3.0 (quilt)" Debian source package format [LWN.net]

Raphaël Hertzog blogs about his work on the new source format known as "3.0 (quilt)". "This patch can have two functions: creating the required files in the debian sub-directory and applying changes to the upstream sources. Over time, if the maintainer made several modifications to the upstream source code, they would end up entangled (and undocumented) in this single patch. In order to solve this problem, patch systems were created (dpatch, quilt, simple-patchsys, dbs, ...) and many maintainers started using them. Each implementation is slightly different but the basic principle is always the same: store the upstream changes as multiple patches in the debian/patches/ directory and apply them at build-time (and remove them during cleanup)."

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