Comment by jancsika

2 days ago

> The canonical git format is “patches applied”.

How many Debian packages have patches applied to upstream?

10 comments

jancsika

Reply
rurban  2 days ago

Most, because Debian is the only distro which strictly enforces their manpages and filesystem standards. And most source packages don't care much, resp. have other ideas

dima55  2 days ago

Lots. Because many upstream projects don't have their build system set up to work within a distribution (to get dependencies form the system and to install to standard places). All distros must patch things to get them to work.

  • latchup  2 days ago

    Well, there are big differences in how aggressively things are patched. Arch Linux makes a point to strictly minimize patches and avoid them entirely whenever possible. That's a good thing, because otherwise, nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages for mutilating their work and/or forcing old and buggy versions on unsuspecting users.

dspillett  2 days ago

A fair few I expect, amongst actively developed apps/utils/libs. Away from sid (unstable) Debian packages are often a bit behind upstream but still supported, so security fixes are often back-ported if the upstream project isn't also maintaining older releases that happen to match the version(s) in testing/stable/oldstable.