Re: package offering: gnupg

[Charles Wilson <cwilson at ece dot gatech dot edu>]

Billinghurst, David (CRTS) wrote:

> I'd prefer the re-autotool stuff to be part of the user build process.
> I was going to propose this for ImageMagick, as it reduces the patches
> from approx 1 Mb down to 2 lines.  Much easier to understand.

IMO, this is a maintainer decision.  If David wants to keep the cygwin 
"fork" small, but require the autotools to build-from-source, that's up 
to him.  Some existing packages do it that way; others include a 
massively huge "re-autotool" patch in the -src package.  Either way.

Ideally, David's method is "better" -- because that way it's easier to 
"up-port" the cygwin fork to a new version, it's clear what the 
"important" changes are that need to be pushed upstream, etc.  However, 
it's harder for the cygwin maintainer to keep things separate -- 
especially the "./foo-VER-REL.sh spkg" step, because the mkpatch 
sub-step becomes tricky if not impossible to automate...therefore, you 
have to manually maintain the (small) patch.

I tend to use David's method when I'm syncing against source in a CVS 
repository (libtool, a few others).  I tend to just say "ah, the heck 
with it" and ship a mega-patch in other cases.

FWIW, I haven't had a chance to look specifically at David's gnupg 
package yet.  I'll try to do so tomorrow -- but I'm on dailup now... :-(

--Chuck