On Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Takahiro Kambe wrote:
But once I choose to using a patch, previous patch needs to be applied and always fear chosen patch files would be modified suddenly.
I have now extended our patch management tools slightly to allow a slight change in the patch policy based on your suggestion. When a published patch is updated a version number is now added to the patch. This scheme has already been put into use as can be seen in the squid-2.5.STABLE9-dns_query patch which is now at version 3 (squid-2.5.STABLE9-dns_query-3.patch).
Each new revision of a patch replaces the earlier versions entirely. Only if there is overlaps with another patch inbetween the changes is an incremental patch published.
Broken versions of patches which in our opinion should not be used will be deleted to ensure dist builds or other direct links to the patch file notice the change and stops some people from rebuilding versions with known broken patches.
If there is only minor fixes to the patch the old patch may stay in the patch directory but not visibly linked anymore, allowing dist builds to still use the old version of the patch.
Our policy wrt patches and stable releases has also been expressed more clearly on the patch page, stating that the patches to the current STABLE version represents works in progress and has not yet undergone full QA checks.
It is also our clear preference that binary package wendors try to adhere to the STABLE releases as closely as possible.
Regards Henrik
