Ryan Hill posted on Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:44:33 -0600 as excerpted: > On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:41:39 +0100 David Leverton > <levert...@googlemail.com> wrote: > >> The point I was trying to get at was that it seems a bit heavyweight to >> rely on a whole eclass for a minor use-case, as well as a bit >> error-prone to expect people to remember it every time, but maybe >> that's the least bad option after all.... > > Yeah the whole idea here was to make user patches available without > ebuild modifications or eclass dependence.
Being a user of this functionality since <name forgotten, unfortunately> first introduced it with his bashrc hooks and the additional FEATURES=userpatch he used, and currently using a nasty hack to ensure that it gets run for every package, even those not calling base.eclass... IMO we're over-thinking this. Keep in mind that while being able to simply drop a patch in /etc/portage/patches/cat/pkg/ is very useful indeed, ultimately, all it does is eliminate the necessity of manually copying the ebuild to a personal overlay and setting up the patch to be applied via the ebuild itself. My suggestion is therefore to do the simple thing, just apply any patches found in the patches dir, and punt on the complicated do-we-eautoreconf- or-not thing. Just having the patches applied consistently will be a HUGE improvement from what we have at the moment, and it doesn't prevent people from falling back to the old copy-ebuild-to-overlay-and-modify method, should anything "fancy", including eautoreconf, but of course also including all the other things people modify ebuilds for OTHER than "simple patching", be needed. IOW, let's quit letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, and just get on with it, already. I know from experience that this eliminates a good 80-90% of what would otherwise be personal overlay ebuilds, here, and it's not as if it's an EITHER overlay OR patches dir thing, so let's "just do it", and people who need anything fancier can still do the overlay thing they're doing now, while those just applying a simple patch no longer have to worry about whether dropping it in patches is enough or not. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
