Subject: Patch scripts 0.9 improvements
From: Andreas Gruenbacher <[email-masked]>
To: Andrew Morton <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 14:39:16 +0100

Hi Andrew,

I still find your patch management scripts very useful. There are a fewg
small limitations that still keeps me from using them for the SuSEg
kernel at the moment. Particularly I need a way to have sub-directoriesg
in patches/ etc.

Please find some improvements and ideas in the attached patch.

Also I think it would be a good idea to keep all (non-temporary)g
information pertaining to a patch in a single file, rather thang
splitting into .patch, .txt, .pc files. I have a format like theg
following in mind. A simple parser for that proposed format is alsog
attached.

	Summary: Test patch
	Author: Andreas Gruenbacher <[email-masked]>
	URL: http://www.suse.de/

	%description
	DESCRIPTION

	%files
	FILE1
	FILE2
	FILE3

	%patch
	PATCH

I think that it doesn't make much sense to keep the .pc files (%filesg
section) as part of the patch set; they can easily be regenerated fromg
the .patch files. They are useful while working on a set of patchesg
though. What do you think of always generating them on the fly, insteadg
of using import_patch? Then the patches and series files could beg
checked out from CVS, and patching could start immediately; no cruftg
would assemble in the .pc files.

Another idea: Maybe all the *~* files could live in their own directoryg
tree, e.g., under pc/? Then the file names would become more simple,g
e.g., from file.x~patch to ps/patch/file.x and file.x~dir_patch tog
dir/patch/file.x, with a smaller chance of clashes. What do you think
of that?

Cheers,
Andreas.

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