Comment by eichin
2 days ago
https://wiki.debian.org/UsingQuilt but the short form is that you keep the original sources untouched, then as part of building the package, you apply everything in a `debian/patches` directory, do the build, and then revert them. Sort of an extreme version of "clearly labelled changes" - but tedious to work with since you need to apply, change and test, then stuff the changes back into diff form (the quilt tool uses a push/pop mechanism, so this isn't entirely mad.)
Ha yes that does sound mad. If only there was a version control system specifically designed to track changes to code...
Quilt predates Git. Back then source was distributed as a tarball, and Debian simply maintained a directory full of patches to apply to the tarball.
Sure but Git has been available (and super popular) for almost 20 years now.
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it's quite difficult to maintain a quilt like workflow with plain git
I've tried it
Quilt is difficult to maintain, but a quilt-like workflow? Easy: it's just a branch with all patches as commits. You can re-apply those to new releases of the upstream by using `git rebase --onto $new_upstream_commit_tag_or_branch`.
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