[arch-dev-public] patching

[Paul Mattal]

I wanted to ask about how others treat patching.

My understanding of our patching philosophy is:

1) Don't patch if doing so makes us un-vanilla. Users familiar with 
the standard behavior of software should be able to rely on our 
packaged versions to behave the same way.

2) If there's some major roadblock (crash, hang, data loss, chronic 
incompatibility), apply a reasonable patch as a workaround, as long 
as this kind of patch for this kind of problem has not been rejected 
upstream. Report the bug and patch upstream, and remove the patch 
from our package when upstream integrates a fix.

3) We don't maintain upstream software; we should not do a lot of 
work to patch unmaintained software.

Is this a good summary? Or do others have differing views on some of 
this? Things to add?

- P