On Sun, 15 Jan 2006, Adam C Powell IV wrote: > On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 23:23 +0100, Santiago Vila wrote: > > On Sun, 9 Oct 2005, Adam C Powell IV wrote: > > > > > It looks like about 80-90% of the patch is unnecessary to support this > > > architecture, e.g. there's no need for openrisc, os400, djgpp, crx etc. > > > in a Debian system. Can you please edit out the unnecessary parts so > > > the patch is more compact, while supporting the new arch (and other new > > > ones like armeb)? If you don't, I will try, but I can't guarantee it > > > will work... > > > > Well, there might be no need for openrisc, os400, djgpp, crx, but if > > you think about it, there is really no need to make the patch shorter > > either. > > Sure there is. It's about conciseness and verifiability. I want a set > of small patches which someone can reasonably say, "Okay, I see what > that does, it does that and nothing more," and not worry that it will do > something bad to their machine. Long patches which do much more than is > needed for Debian are inherently bad.
I understand that you prefer a small patch over a big patch *in general*, but a small patch is not always more verifiable. In this case, for example, if you use the most recent config.guess and config.guess, it will be easy to verify that the modified versions match the ones in the autotools-dev package. The latest versions of those files in the autotools-dev package are the ones we *fully* trust, for *every* machine. Everybody can reasonably say "okay, I see that the patch updates those files to the latest version, which I trust". You even admit that if you try to make the patch smaller, you don't guarantee that it will work. We know that the full config.guess and config.sub files do work and we trust them. Why lose your time (or ask anybody else to lose his time) trying to make the patch smaller when doing so increases the risk of breaking something? I for one would certainly not consider this package "safer" just because you managed to save a few bytes in the size of the patch. In such case I would start worrying about it, not the opposite. So I agree that a small patch is better than a long patch in general, but there are exceptions, and this is one of them. If you try to make it smaller, the probability of breaking something increases, not decreases. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
