Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Xulrunner freedom bug: how to apply patch?

[Sam Geeraerts]

Christophe Jarry wrote:
> Is it possible for me to "just" write a patch (eventually a .deb
> package) that would patch every xulrunner update on the fly? I am
> thinking about some kind of `xulrunner-plugin-patch' package on which
> xulrunner would depend, so that every xulrunner update will
> automatically call the patch. Can this work?

Does the fix require a change in the compiled source code or is it 
sufficient to modify a system-wide configuration file? In case of the 
latter you can implement something similar to deltah's 
openoffice.org-fix package [1]. It uses dpkg-divert to move aside the 
regular file and replace it with a new one.

The upside of this tactic is that we don't have to track xulrunner and 
that we don't have to keep the whole thing in our VCS. The downside is 
that existing installs don't get the new package automatically (new 
installs would get it via tasksel).

If you need to change the actual source code than there's no alternative 
but to track upstream. Metad doesn't have an automatic source patching 
infrastructure like deltah has.

[1] bzr://sandbox.gnewsense.org/packages-deltah/openoffice.org-fix/