This is related to my recent post asking for people to poke holes in a redesigned source layout.
If Mirian writes the implementation, would we want to use this? Thanks, -- Raul ----- Forwarded message from Mirian Crzig Lennox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Mirian Crzig Lennox) Subject: Re: A Linux Elbows - flavors Date: 23 Dec 2000 15:31:18 -0500 On Fri, Dec 22, 2000 at 03:42:57PM -0500, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote: >> Please, please, please take a look at the FreeBSD ports collection, >> the anoncvs server and the cvsweb interface. THIS is how to do an open >> source package collection without making life a living hell for outside >> developers. I responded: >Mind suggesting how we should approach this, when many of our package >maintainers don't have access to support remote cvs? After thinking about this a bit, it's possible to accomplish the moral equivalent without CVS, by using rsync (which debian already provides for) and a relatively minor change to the source package system: Change the debian source package system so that patches are correlated with changelog information. One way this could be done (not necessarily the best way, but it would work) would be to simply include a byte-offset into the diff file in the changelog entry. This means that instead of being a monolithic diff glob, the diff for package revision 'x+1' would be the diff for package revision 'x', with the diff to get from 'x' to 'x+1' appended. Alternatively, every revision's diffs could simply be kept in a separate file, though this would mean that some code would need to be changed in the unpacking of source packages. But either way, rsync would pick up only additional diffs if a previous source package were already on the local disk, and it would be much, MUCH easier for an outside developer like myself to maintain local changes to debian packages. I think such a change could be made compatible with the current format of source packages; old tools would simply ignore the byte-offset in the changelog, and new tools would know by the absense of the byte-offset that they were dealing with an old-format source package. Anyway... this is my suggestion. If you think it would be worthwhile, feel free to propose this to anyone in the debian organization you think might be interested; as a debian developer your words may carry more weight. I think the actual code involved would be fairly trivial -- just a couple of changes to the dpkg-buildpackage and dpkg-source... I'd even volunteer to write the code if I thought people would use it. --Mirian ----- End forwarded message -----
