Patch systems in packages

[Scott Kitterman]

On Sunday 17 August 2008 01:37, Nicolas Valcarcel wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-08-17 at 01:27 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> > For Debian, many maintainers keep their packages in their favorite VCS
> > and so
> > it's less relevant as a policy issue.
>
> Yes, but for the debian maintainers it will be easy to check for
> separate patches on the debian derivatives than reading a big diff
> including a lot of changes.

Which is why as a good downstream we should be filing bugs with explicit 
explanation of the patch and the patch in the upstream BTS.  

Even in cases where I'm the Debian maintainer and I made the change in Ubuntu 
I find the monlithic patches that get linked into PTS hard to deal with.  In 
all the hundreds of uploads I've done, I can only recall one occasion where a 
Debian maintainer changed something based on just that patch.  OTOH, I've had 
great success with bugs that have a good rationale and a patch.

Scott K