Nikos Chantziaras <rea...@arcor.de> writes: > 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.
One problem here is the order of patches. Often the order that the patches need to be applied is important, and your mechanism does not allow you to specify the order with respect to those patches in the ebuild. Another problem is that when a package is upgraded, the patches required can change. The patch that worked with version X might have to be changed for version X+1 or may not be needed any more. So it is necessary to do some work anyway when upgrading packages.
