[PLUG] My recent experimentation with various OS's

Brent Rieck bsr at spek.org
Thu Nov 13 08:16:02 UTC 2003


Jason Van Cleve wrote:
> Curious.  So these are binary patches to prebuilt packages, correct?
> Interesting concept, but I shouldn't think it very useful to someone who
> wants to use a diff from a mailing list, or who has written their own
> patch, as I have done sometimes.  Sounds like you need the source to
> create these binary patches (and probably to rebuild the .deb); so from
> an end user perspective, it should be much easier to just build from
> source and be done with it.

Well, the patch maker would need the old deb and the new manually 
unpacked patched and repacked deb to create the xdelta patch file they'd 
distribute.  But it seems so dramatically easier to just download the 
pre-patched version.

> Now in the gentoo world, instead of distributing a binary patch (if I
> understand the xdelta process), an updated "ebuild" is distributed with
> an added source patch.  Then the source tarball, which is normally kept
> on the user's system, can be rebuilt with the new patch.

Does Gentoo also distribute the pre-patched source in addition to the 
patch, or does it make everybody apply the patch?

--Brent





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