Re: [Quilt-dev] status query for patch description feature

[Joe Green]

Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> I strongly dislike keeping the header in a separate file. This can only cause 
> trouble.

I saw this as just following the model of not modifying a patch until a 
refresh is done, and that meant I needed to have a place to put it. 
Especially for new patches, I didn't want to create the patch just to 
hold the header, and I did want people to be able to create a header 
right away after "quilt new" because many will forget if they leave it 
until later.

> The header templates and comments are a nice idea. One possible extension 
> would be to always add the comments when editing, and to remove them when 
> saving. This would require a structured header format that is less general, 
> though.

The one comment that is currently added dynamically whenever a header is 
edited is an initial line that states which patch the description is 
for.  The templates are only used if there is no header.

Thinking about Yashi's comments, maybe something like a separate 
"default_header" that is always applied to new patches, and some kind of 
"comments" file that is always appended or prepended when editing would 
be more useful to some people.

> This is all pretty policy dependent. I've mentioned before that I'm not keen 
> on dragging too much policy into quilt, so I'll definitely not blindly add 
> this command. This could easily discuss users who would otherwise find quilt 
> pretty useful.

I must say, I had this patch marked out as one of the local changes that 
nobody else would likely want :).  I only posted it because Yashi 
brought the issue up and I thought he and other might find it useful; I 
wasn't really expecting it to go into the standard distribution.

There isn't much policy in the patch I posted.  The default template 
could even be empty.  I expect users would modify the default (that's 
what I do locally) or override it using patches/default_header.

--
Joe Green <address@hidden>
MontaVista Software, Inc.