[neomutt-devel] PATCHES considered harmful

Damien Riegel damien.riegel at gmail.com
Sat Apr 29 23:22:49 CEST 2017


On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 10:34:53AM -0700, David Champion wrote:
> * On 28 Apr 2017, Richard Russon wrote: 
> > But then it struck me.  Why does the PATCHES file exist?
> > It's very presence *encourages* people to fork mutt!
> 
> And we can't have that!
> 
> 
> > I think we should remove the file completely.
> 
> It was added originally to assist with support and debugging.  People
> *do* add patches.

And they have to be kind enough to add them to the PATCHES file so it's
listed in mutt -v. That step must be automatic or not be, because if
that output is not reliable, we still have to ask people what version
they use/where did they get it.

I would go for something based on PACKAGE_VERSION, MUTT_VERSION, and git
describe. Or change the output to print a warning message if the build
is dirty or not based on an upstream tag. Agreed that PATCHES should be
removed.

Thanks,
-- 
Damien


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