[arch-dev-public] patching

[Allan McRae]

On 11/03/10 09:01, Paul Mattal wrote:
> 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?
>

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/DeveloperWiki:Patching