Patching

Informacja

Patches are ignored when in development mode for packages with a development revision, for local VCS packages or when in local-sources mode for internal packages.

The patching stage for a package provides the ability for a developer to apply one or more patches to extracted sources. A project may take advantage of acquiring sources from one or more externally managed implementations. Fetched sources may not be able to build in a developer’s releng-tool project due to limitations of the implementation or build scripts provided by the package. A developer can prepare a series of patches to apply to a package and submit changes upstream to correct the issue. However, the developer is then left to either wait for the changes to be merged in or needs to make a custom archive with the appropriate modifications already applied. To avoid this, a developer can include patches directly in the package folder to be automatically applied during patching stage.

When a package’s patch stage is reached, releng-tool will look for patches found inside the package folder with the extension .patch. Patches found inside a package folder are applied in ascending order. It is recommended to prefix patch filenames with a numerical value for clarity. For example, the following package patches:

$ cd package/liba
$ ls *.patch
0001-accept-linker-flags.patch
0002-correct-output-path.patch
0003-support-disabling-test-build.patch
liba
liba.hash

With be applied in the following order:

  1. 0001-accept-linker-flags.patch

  2. 0002-correct-output-path.patch

  3. 0003-support-disabling-test-build.patch

If a user configures their build environment in development mode, patches will not be applied if a package defines a development revision. The idea is that a development revision is most likely the bleeding edge source of a package and does not need any patches. If a user configures their build environment in local-sources mode and a package is defined as internal, patches will not be applied to the sources. This is to prevent the patching system from making unexpected modifications to a developer’s local sources.