patches to wesnoth, or rather general issue with substvar handling

[Gerfried Fuchs]

* Sarah Hobbs <hobbsee at kubuntu.org> [2007-10-24 13:46:27 CEST]:
> >  This thing propably won't need to get fixed for wesnoth because I plan
> > to introduce the wesnoth-all package in Debian too, suggested by
> > upstream (never heard anything about it from any MOTU that this patch is
> > hanging in there, though, which I would have expected out of courtsey
> > and getting changes pushed back upstream), but I thought I'd make you
> > aware of the issue in case this wrong approach is used in other MOTU
> > patches, too.
> 
> Just checking, but you do know about
> http://packages.qa.debian.org/w/wesnoth.html - the section that says
> Patches?  The "Patch from ubuntu for version 1.2.6-1ubuntu2" URL might
> be of particular interest?

 Yes. And do you know about that from my part having to go look there
for every single package every once in a while to see if there is
something new is a quite broken approach, when having some amount of
packages, especially since these patches often don't really apply to
Debian like in the case of spl: <http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/spl.html>

 The person who does the changes in Ubuntu should propably pretty well
know if something would be helpful to Debian as well and push it back
to Debian in the sense of not having to put any further effort into
maintaining the patch, which is a win-win situation for all involved
parties.

> Of course, it's better if it gets forwarded to your bugtracker as well -
> but where it doesn't, it's always worthwhile checking the patches
> section for ubuntu patches.

 My perception on "always worthwhile" is most of the time either wasted
time just to find nothing or something, like in the above mentioned
case, that doesn't apply to Debian, which makes it a quite huge effort
for little gain, where a simply notification from the person who changed
something is a little effort for a big gain.

 So long,
Rhonda