------------------------------------------------------ Quick Guide To Patching This Package For The Impatient ------------------------------------------------------ 1. Make sure you have quilt installed 2. Unpack the package as usual with "dpkg-source -x" 3. Run the "patch" target in debian/rules 4. Create a new patch with "quilt new" (see quilt(1)) 5. Edit all the files you want to include in the patch with "quilt edit" (see quilt(1)). 6. Write the patch with "quilt refresh" (see quilt(1)) 7. Run the "clean" target in debian/rules Alternatively, instead of using quilt directly, you can drop the patch in to debian/patches and add the name of the patch to debian/patches/series. ------------------------------------ Guide To The X Strike Force Packages ------------------------------------ The X Strike Force team maintains X packages in git repositories on git.debian.org in the pkg-xorg subdirectory. Most upstream packages are actually maintained in git repositories as well, so they often just need to be pulled into git.debian.org in a "upstream-*" branch. Otherwise, the upstream sources are manually installed in the Debian git repository. The .orig.tar.gz upstream source file could be generated this "upstream-*" branch in the Debian git repository but it is actually copied from upstream tarballs directly. Due to X.org being highly modular, packaging all X.org applications as their own independent packages would have created too many Debian packages. For this reason, some X.org applications have been grouped into larger packages: xutils, xutils-dev, x11-apps, x11-session-utils, x11-utils, x11-xfs-utils, x11-xkb-utils, x11-xserver-utils. Most packages, including the X.org server itself and all libraries and drivers are, however maintained independently. The Debian packaging is added by creating the "debian-*" git branch which contains the aforementioned "upstream-*" branch plus the debian/ repository files. When a patch has to be applied to the Debian package, two solutions are involved: * If the patch is available in one of the upstream branches, it may be git'cherry-picked into the Debian repository. In this case, it appears directly in the .diff.gz. * Otherwise, the patch is added to debian/patches/ which is managed with quilt as documented in /usr/share/doc/quilt/README.source. quilt is actually invoked by the Debian X packaging through a larger set of scripts called XSFBS. XSFBS brings some other X specific features such as managing dependencies and conflicts due to the video and input driver ABIs. XSFBS itself is maintained in a separate repository at git://git.debian.org/pkg-xorg/xsfbs.git and it is pulled inside the other Debian X repositories when needed. The XSFBS patching system requires a build dependency on quilt. Also a dependency on $(STAMP_DIR)/patch has to be added to debian/rules so that the XSFBS patching occurs before the actual build. So the very first target of the build (likely the one running autoreconf) should depend on $(STAMP_DIR)/patch. It should also not depend on anything so that parallel builds are correctly supported (nothing should probably run while patching is being done). And finally, the clean target should depend on the xsfclean target so that patches are unapplied on clean. When the upstream sources contain some DFSG-nonfree files, they are listed in text files in debian/prune/ in the "debian-*" branch of the Debian repository. XSFBS' scripts then take care of removing these listed files during the build so as to generate a modified DFSG-free .orig.tar.gz tarball.