Notice of intent: patching glibc

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 8:05 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 03:27:15PM -0800, Jef Spaleta wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Well, yes, that parallel came up in my mind too, but really, the two
>> > aren't particularly similar. I don't think there's any intent to
>> > obfuscate in the case of the glibc spec, it's simply done the way that
>> > seemed convenient to its maintainers at the time. Note the Fedora kernel
>> > package is a normal source / split out patches set. I'm not sure that
>> > whole kerfuffle is particularly relevant to Fedora.
>> >
>> >
>>  Let me turn that on its head.
>>
>> As more projects become git based over time, the preferred form for code
>> development might actually be a bisectable git checkout and not broken out
>> patchsets for some projects. I'm not sure the distribution and packaging
>> model that we collectively understand now and which grew up in the cvs and
>> svn dominated era fits really well in the git dominated era.  I think we are
>> still groping around trying to figure out what the "preferred form" really
>> is in the git dominated era. I'm not sure the broken out patchset will be
>> it. It might soon be considered a legacy format in some situations.
>
> While I agree with you, the glibc "big blob of patch" approach
> isn't in either of the preferred forms.
>
> Wishlist item:
>
> At the same time that RPM allows you to bundle a git repo, perhaps we
> can finally get rid of %changelog?

%changelog isn't for developers.  It's for users to see what the
developers changed in the package.

josh