Re: [ITP] quilt-0.43 -- Tool to work with series of patches

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Jari Aalto wrote:

> sdesc: "Tool to work with series of patches"
> ldesc: "Program manages a series of patches by keeping track of the
> changes each of them makes. They are logically organized as a stack,
> and you can apply, un-apply, refresh them easily by traveling into the
> stack (push/pop). Quilt is good for managing additional patches
> applied to a package received as a tarball or maintained in another
> version control system. The stacked organization proved to be
> efficient for the management of very large patch sets (more than
> hundred patches)."
> category: Devel
> requires: cygwin bzip2 patch

The following files in the binary package are perl scripts (with #!/bin/perl as
the first line) yet you don't list perl in the "requires" line.  Is this package
meant to be usable without perl installed or is this an oversight?

/usr/bin/guards
/usr/share/quilt/scripts/dependency-graph
/usr/share/quilt/scripts/edmail
/usr/share/quilt/scripts/parse-patch
/usr/share/quilt/scripts/remove-trailing-ws

The postinstall/preremove system seems unnecessarily complex.  It includes
nearly 250 lines of shell script and two manifests to do what could be
accomplished simply with:

[ ! -f /etc/quilt.quiltrc ] && \
  cp /etc/defaults/etc/quilt.quiltrc /etc/quilt.quiltrc

and

cmp -s /etc/defaults/etc/quilt.quiltrc /etc/quilt.quiltrc && \
  rm -f /etc/quilt.quiltrc

...and by locating the default quiltrc file under /etc/defaults instead of
stashed away in /usr/share/doc/quilt-<VER>/examples/quilt.quiltrc and requiring
all that scripting to locate.  And these scripts have code for printing
warnings/messages to stderr but all postinstall/preremove scripts run in
setup.exe with both stdout and stderr connected to /dev/null so this can serve
no purpose.

However, it seems like these scripts are probably provided from some generic
build system (cygbuild?) and so if it's easier to do it the overly-complex way
then go with that.  Still, it seems a lot more error-prone.

Source builds fine, everything else looks OK.

Brian