Quilt a tool from package maintainers for package maintainers. Tony Vroom told me of it two days ago on #gentoo-dev, and I started using it right after having read a short introduction by one of the authors, Andreas Grünbacher, “fellow maintainer” at SuSE.
Quilt basically is a version management system, but instead of focusing on files and revisions, it focuses on patches. What you’re able to do with this, basically, is to prepare patches for a package in a simple way without having to have a lot of copies of the same sources over and over and over. Using it I was able to prepare 23 patches to Avidemux (that I’ve obviously submitted to the author, that hopefully will merge them for the next version.. currently it’s a 2.1 pre-release so it’s masked in portage, where the 23 patches are applied, too), without having more than one copy of the sources on disk.
It was simple with that fixing a typo in a patch that I already prepared half an hour before, or removing completely a patch from the stack.
I think that it can really be an useful tool for package (and ebuild) maintainers, and really deserve to be known.
Long life Quilt! 🙂
