Comment 7 for bug 806940

On 12 July 2011 07:32, James Westby <email address hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, 07 Jul 2011 19:15:39 -0000, Martin Pitt <email address hidden> wrote:
>> As a side question, is all that trouble with having applied patches in
>> bzr really worth it? I never got it right myself, it makes you want to
>> pull your hair out, it's against common practice, makes commit diffs
>> ugly to read, breaks merge-upstream, etc.
>>
>> Can we just switch UDD to having non-applied patches perhaps?
>
> We could. My justification for doing it was:
>
>  * Debian is going through a multi-year effort to have patches-applied
>    when a source package is unpacked. I agree with that and want it to
>    be the default state for UDD
>
>  * There wasn't a good way to do it without storing the patches-applied
>    state in the revision.
>
> Obviously the second isn't a good reason, just an implementation
> shortfall.
>
> I would advocate for fixing that rather than regressing to
> patches-unapplied, and certainly would recommend against
> patches-unapplied without an idea of how it could be transititioned back
> to the better state.
>
> It may be that for the sake of user's enjoyment that is the change that
> should be made in the short term though.
>
> I don't have the time to drive this forward at this stage. I hope that
> someone from the Bazaar team can do that.

For handling quilts, we are thinking of having the bzr client able to
unapply/reapply the patches, so we can resolve changes between each of
them on the way up. That would also give a chance to store the
unpatched source in the branch, but also have it patched-up by default
when people get a checkout, which would be broadly similar to what
apt-get source does. (I guess that policy would be done by
bzr-builddeb; there's policy a confusion failure mode there if people
get such a branch and don't have that plugin.)