Comment by zozbot234
3 years ago
Debian-based distros make it easy to rebuild .deb's with extra patches. Source package management and build-time dependency tracking is integrated in the package manager, so it's just a matter of downloading the source, adding your own .patch file and rebuilding.
I wouldn't call that easy. Downloading source, doing a patch and rebuilding once is doable[1] with some manual work. But even that doesn't last, it's extremely brittle the moment you try to update anything. Debian isn't build with forks in mind, it wants one big monolithic dependency tree and when you move away from that it falls apart quickly. Which is the reason why they recommend to remove all third party stuff whenever you do a dist-upgrade.
[1] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/324680/how-to-apply...
That's what I did, it was pretty easy. Apt got the build dependencies for me, I just had to make the code change and dpkg-buildsomething made it, and then dpkg -i.
Luckily I don't update often and this package should be forward compatible for a long time given the slow rate of change.