gravityboy (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} gravityboy) wrote,@ 2005-07-22 00:13:00 |
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Quilt Rocks My Socks
Last time I blogged about a bug a lot of people had reported with X.Org, and at that time the workaround was to download a file and replace the installed version with it. Well, Eugene Konev came through and found a more complete patch and we've got that bug essentially fixed on our end, so I think most people can now run X.Org on Debian without fear. The bug in gcc4 is still present, but the next upload of gcc will include a fix for the issue, so we'll feel a lot more confident that the bug is really dealt with the next time we upload. Another thing that's happened is that it appears that the current upload does finally build on all arches (after I messed up -3, which should have been the one to do so) so that's one major issue happily out of the way.
We've already begun putting together another X.Org upload that should happen soonish. There's a pretty crippling bug on alpha that Steve Langasek has already provided a patch for. The big news though is that I've finally ripped out the X.Org package reliance on dbs and replaced it with quilt. Eugene Konev hacked up a very good version of the debian/rules file (which controls building of the package, for those of you who haven't dealt with the internals of a .deb before) that uses quilt instead of dbs. I did a little work on it myself so that it would provide the same basic features that dbs gave us, and now it's been rolled in to the svn archive.
Now this won't directly affect any users, but what it will do is let us process patches much faster than with dbs. dbs requires that you copy the whole source tree once, copy it again after applying patches, and then diff the whole tree when it's done. For small trees this isn't a huge deal, but for X.Org this is crippling, especially on my laptop where I do all my work. quilt lets me edit patches in place, and only diff those files that are edited. In addition, if there's a patch that I already pulled from somewhere like X.Org CVS or Redhat's bugzilla, I can simply tell quilt to import it and it will. This literally will save me an hour per patch. quilt also buys us some cool features like being able to check patch dependencies, tell what patches alter what files, and sort patches in to subdirectory heirarchies rather than having hundreds of patches sorted solely by name. Plus, it knows about patch documentation, which dbs will overwrite by default, and quilt will happily preserve.
So hopefully this will make the XSF ever so slightly faster at getting things done, although we're still obviously hampered by the scale of the source tree. Future patch audits should be on the order of days rather than weeks with this system, which lays the groundwork for work on 6.9/7.0.
Last time I blogged about a bug a lot of people had reported with X.Org, and at that time the workaround was to download a file and replace the installed version with it. Well, Eugene Konev came through and found a more complete patch and we've got that bug essentially fixed on our end, so I think most people can now run X.Org on Debian without fear. The bug in gcc4 is still present, but the next upload of gcc will include a fix for the issue, so we'll feel a lot more confident that the bug is really dealt with the next time we upload. Another thing that's happened is that it appears that the current upload does finally build on all arches (after I messed up -3, which should have been the one to do so) so that's one major issue happily out of the way.
We've already begun putting together another X.Org upload that should happen soonish. There's a pretty crippling bug on alpha that Steve Langasek has already provided a patch for. The big news though is that I've finally ripped out the X.Org package reliance on dbs and replaced it with quilt. Eugene Konev hacked up a very good version of the debian/rules file (which controls building of the package, for those of you who haven't dealt with the internals of a .deb before) that uses quilt instead of dbs. I did a little work on it myself so that it would provide the same basic features that dbs gave us, and now it's been rolled in to the svn archive.
Now this won't directly affect any users, but what it will do is let us process patches much faster than with dbs. dbs requires that you copy the whole source tree once, copy it again after applying patches, and then diff the whole tree when it's done. For small trees this isn't a huge deal, but for X.Org this is crippling, especially on my laptop where I do all my work. quilt lets me edit patches in place, and only diff those files that are edited. In addition, if there's a patch that I already pulled from somewhere like X.Org CVS or Redhat's bugzilla, I can simply tell quilt to import it and it will. This literally will save me an hour per patch. quilt also buys us some cool features like being able to check patch dependencies, tell what patches alter what files, and sort patches in to subdirectory heirarchies rather than having hundreds of patches sorted solely by name. Plus, it knows about patch documentation, which dbs will overwrite by default, and quilt will happily preserve.
So hopefully this will make the XSF ever so slightly faster at getting things done, although we're still obviously hampered by the scale of the source tree. Future patch audits should be on the order of days rather than weeks with this system, which lays the groundwork for work on 6.9/7.0.
