Posted by Serge on Sat 24 Sep 2005 at 07:28
I've been looking into the new maintainer howto, to try and understand how I should properly patch an existing Debian package, in case a Sarge package rsync.
I'm being confronted with a rather anoying bug in rsync, which totally brakes rsnapshot for me. Read all about that in #317418.
Although I quite understand what Debian "stable" is all about, I fail to understand how a non-security bug, that nevertheless severely breaks a package, is not solved in Debian stable. But that's only a sidenote.
My other readings went to, as always, the very nice articles here, in particular this article rebuilding Debian Packages.
I wanted to patch rsync-2.6.4 with the patch I linked to in my bug report, to solve my rsnapshot problem. I tried it and thought I did well. The resulting package built without errors and can be found here:
The problem is, the bug remains :) I suspect the patch didn't get applied.
Basically what I did was update the changelog and saving the patch in debian/patches. I suppose there is something more to do as to tell the system to use that patch, but that tiny little detail isn't clear in the New Maintainers howto.
Even more, the examples presented never clearly explain my situation where one wants to patch an existing deb.
I also found it quite confusing when the manual explains different 'patch systems' (debuild, others, ...) I'm not sure why there are different systems.
I hope this brings an interesting view for the more advanced debian developer to understand which part of the new maintainer manual isn't quite clear. But then again, it might just be me :)
A lot of explanation, but what I want to ask is if somebody would have a look on my custom package and explain me the detail of what I missed. Thanks!
This article can be found online at the Debian Administration website at the following bookmarkable URL:
This article is copyright 2005 Serge - please ask for permission to republish or translate.