Let's talk about arch-specific quilt patches.

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 11:18:40AM -0700, Robert Park wrote:
> Up until a couple of days ago, I was blissfully ignorant of the fact
> that some packages need to have different distropatches depending on
> which arch the package is built for.

Rather than improving this method (which among other things makes it
intrinsically impossible to use the modern 3.0 (quilt) source format
properly), I strongly feel that we need to try very very very hard not
to do this in the first place.  lp:signon, for instance, could trivially
mangle signond.conf in or shortly after the "make install"-type phase
using architecture-specific code, rather than having
architecture-specific patches.  I'm not familiar with the framework used
in lp:cordova-ubuntu-tests but it could at worst prepare a temporary
autotest tree without too much effort before running it.

This whole thing, to me, is an example of a tempting misdesign that is
better avoided.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]