Package: quilt Version: 0.65-2 Severity: minor Dear Maintainer,
Sometimes quilt users must be able to switch between completely different patch series. For example, I ran into this issue when dealing with applying an extra patch in debian/patches (to configure both RCU_EXPERT and RCU_NOCB_CPU to default to "yes" to deal with random Ryzen lockups) which turned out to conflict with a patch in debian/patches-rt that "also" patched RCU_EXPERT default from "no" to something else where apt-src applies the former set of patches when installing and applies the latter set of patches on top of the former set when building just (I think) the rt set of binary packages for the linux kernel. I guess it could be claimed that the Debian Linux kernel should be reorganized to use just one patch series, but currently that is not the case (probably because that reorganization would be difficult), and that is likely true of some other packages as well. In sum, multiple patch series are an unfortunate fact of life. The only way to manage multiple patch series with quilt that I am aware of (and it took a difficult google search to find this information) is to specify both the QUILT_PATCHES and QUILT_PC environment variables where the former points to the directory where the series file is located (either debian/patches or debian/patches-rt) and the latter is necessary to change between the normal .pc location to somewhere else (I used .pc-rt for the above specific case), I guess it could be argued that it is a rare case when you attempt to manage with quilt two distinct patch series so QUILT_PC is normally unnecessary. But when you need it (as in the above case) it is a lifesaver so I think it is worth documenting this environment variable in the man page in the same section where QUILT_PATCHES and several other environment variables are already documented. You may also want to change the documentation of QUILT_SERIES there that claims the search order for series can be prempted by an absolute pathname for the series file, but that didn't work, and QUILT_PC did the trick instead with QUILT_SERIES=series (which is the same as the default value). -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers testing-debug APT policy: (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'testing') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.18.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_CA.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_CA.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_CA:en (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages quilt depends on: ii bsdmainutils 11.1.2+b1 ii bzip2 1.0.6-9 ii diffstat 1.61-1+b1 ii gettext 0.19.8.1-8 ii patch 2.7.6-3 ii perl 5.28.0-3 Versions of packages quilt recommends: ii less 487-0.1+b1 Versions of packages quilt suggests: ii graphviz 2.40.1-5+b1 ii postfix [mail-transport-agent] 3.3.0-1+b1 ii procmail 3.22-26 -- no debconf information