Does anyone think that a mechanism of applying patches to a package
without the need to modify the ebuild of that package would be a useful
feature? There are cases of useful patches that are not accepted by the
maintainers of the ebuild (because they have not been accepted upstream
or other reasons), forcing users to copy ebuilds in their overlay and
modifying the ebuild there. This turns out to be a hassle every time
the package receives an update.
What if we could just specify patches to be applied in, say,
/etc/portage/packages.patch with something like:
media-video/smplayer j-random-hack.patch
and portage would apply that patch automatically? That way, the hassle
of updating the ebuild of a package in which I use custom patches would
go away. The patches could be searched for in a designated directory,
in this example maybe /var/portage/patches/media-video/smplayer (or
something else entirely.)
Can someone think of a way to set up something like this?
