[arch-dev-public] patching

[Paul Mattal]

On 03/10/2010 06:13 PM, Allan McRae wrote:
> 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

Hah! I actually searched for such a wiki page but did not find it. It 
sounds like it's very much in line with what I wrote, but spells out a 
few particular cases, which is very helpful.

I was mostly concerned with determining that folks did not think we 
needed to wait for upstream to approve before patching for big issues. 
We act fast on big issue patches with our best judgment, and then accept 
upstream's judgment once it is established.

- P