Fedora Updates: whole packages vs patches

[Jim Higson]

On Friday 10 Dec 2004 02:47, Michael A. Peters wrote:
> Maybe I'm wrong - but I prefer the whole package approach.
>
> Whole package approach means if I have a custom patch I apply to src, I
> can get the whole package src.rpm and rebuild the fedora update with my
> custom patch to get a binary that works for me.
>
> I suppose they (fedora) could release whole src.rpm package and partial
> rpm patch, but KISS.

Maybe some kind of rpmdiff and rpmmerge tools would help here, if support was 
integrated into apt.

The repository could just carry the packages exactly as they already do, but 
if the user alreay has an older version it'd allow requests like 
<dir>/foopackage-1.2.rpm&patchfrom=1.1 The diffs would be created on request 
and cached.

Then the rpmdiff can transparently be applied to foo-1.1.rpm, on the user's 
side packages foopackage1.1.rpm and foopackage1.2.rpm would both exist in the 
package cache as usual. In fact, the user wouldn't have to know 1.2 came from 
a patch on 1.1.

If done right, this could be pretty simple to use.

-- 
Jim