[Fedora-packaging] shipping distribution-specific patches *separately*

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

Hi!

Quoting a paragraph from:
http://lwn.net/Articles/283030/

> Debian's packaging policy resembles that of most other distributions.
> A Debian source package is supposed to contain a tarball of the
> upstream source distribution, without changes. Any
> distribution-specific patches are included separately and applied
> when the source package is prepared for building.

Do we have a policy that all patches we apply in our packages need to be 
included *separately*? (I couldn't find anything like that in our 
guidelines, but maybe I missed it) And if not: Do we want such a 
statement in our guidelines?

Background: I wanted to use grub as provided by Fedora on a FAT 
partition. That didn't work properly, as the Fedora grub includes this 
patch:
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rpms/grub/F-7/grub-0.93-configfile.patch?view=markup

The main part of it (¹):

-	.string "/boot/grub/menu.lst"
+	.string "/boot/grub/grub.conf"

That of course creates trouble, as FAT due to its 8.3 filemane 
limitations can't store a file called grub.conf. Thus I had to build a 
special grub where this patch wasn't applied. That was no big deal and 
at least for me a easy thing to do.

In F8 and later that's way harder, as there is one patch (created from 
git afaics) where all the patches that in F-7 were applied separately 
are now merged into one giant 1,6 MByte big patch:
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rpms/grub/F-8/grub-fedora-8.patch?view=markup
Building grub without that one patch of course is way harder now, as I 
need to get my hands on that one patch and revert it after the giant 
patch was applied. Not impossible, but way harder if one doesn't know 
where to find that one small patch to revert it.

Do we care or do we want to ignore this (minor) issue?

CU
knurd

(¹) Side note: I think it's wrong to add such a patch, as differing from 
upstream in things like config file naming just creates trouble and 
confusion for everyone.