[ On Thu, June 18, 1998 at 23:20:54 (-0700), Tim Rightnour wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: pkg/5617: Apache-1.3.0 package OS configuration not quite ri
>
> On 19-Jun-98 woods@weird.com spoke unto us all:
> # apply the following patch to the package (note this is an actual patch,
> # not the patch file itself).  [[Do I ever *HATE* creating patches for
> # packages!  What a tedious process!]]
> 
> I may be wrong here, but I imagine its alot easier for the maintainers if you
> just hand them a new patch..  Patching patchfiles is asking for trouble and
> confusion. If I'm wrong about this, pkg maintainers, speak up..  I've been
> submitting a horde of pkg patches lately.. and more will come.

That's a totally separate issue, though I'm beginning to agree.  In the
case of this example I was supplying a brand new patch file.  However
what about the case where many/all of several patch files change in
minor or major ways?

Perhaps they should be shipped as a shell archive in complete form
(i.e. so you'd "rm patches/* ; unshar newpatches").

What I was talking about was creating the patches in the first place.
There are no tools in existance that create patch sets that follow the
guidelines (i.e. one "change" per file, etc.).  This could be done with
CVS, but it would still be *VERY* tedious.  Actually using CVS to try
and manage a pkgsrc module isn't much gain at all.

Creating pkgsrc modules is also far more tedious than I expected.

I really like the concept of pkgsrc, but it's terribly tedious to
maintain, esp. when packages require custom patches.

Some far more detailed documentation by someone extremely well
experienced in these tasks would also help.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>