Re: Some patches and a question

[Attila Fülöp <attila%fueloep.org@localhost>]

Sorry, the formatting of the citation was broken in my previous mail,
here is it again in a hopefully more readable shape.

----

Benny,

thanks for your answer, it helps.

Let me explain my motivation and workflow a bit. I'm running SmartOS on
a publicly available Server. Since the joyent pkgsrc team is so
overloaded (and could need some helping hands) I often end up with an
installation containing a couple of security problems. Once `pkg_admin
audit` makes me worry I do the following:

- Check out e.g. joyent/release/2018Q2 from 'joyent/pkgsrc`
- Check if NetBSDs trunk has a fix. If so backport, otherwise patch it.
- Build a package, sign, upload (to my webserver) and install it on the
zones.

Up to now I was done here, because, um, well, I was to lazy. Now I do
the following.

- Rebase my patches on trunk of 'NetBSD/pkgsrc'
- Push to my clone of 'NetBSD/pkgsrc'
- Open a pull request.

> The more official ways of contributing are, in order of preference:
> 1. Get write access to pkgsrc-wip (which is easy enough), push your
> changes there and ask for them to be imported.
> 2. File a problem report (you can do this on from the web site) with
> an attached patch or uuencoded archive.
> 3. Send mail to one of the mailing lists with a patch attached.

Given that workflow I think 1.) isn't feasible for me without
maintaining two versions of the patches, one based on pkgsrc and one
based on pkgsrc-wip.

I could do 2.) quite easily by replacing the last step with a 'git
format-patch' and file a problem report. My question here is, what shall
I do with really large patches like eg.
https://github.com/NetBSD/pkgsrc/pull/35/commits ? Copy & pasting
several hundred kilobytes of text into a web form is quite error prone.
It would be nice if there was a way to attach files directly, or am I
overlooking something? Would it be OK to just include a link to the patch?

For small patches I will use gnats in the future, for large patches I
may use 3. if there is no way to avoid copy & pasting into the web form.
I was bitten by copy & paste errors much to often already.

By the way http://gnats.netbsd.org redirects me to
http://www.netbsd.org/support/query-pr.html. I think the correct link
would be http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/sendpr.cgi?gndb=netbsd, right?

Thanks again.

Attila