The quilt utility
Jul. 24th, 2013 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mulhern_at_yoctoquilt is a patch organizing utility. Recently, I was upgrading some packages and I got a chance, for the first time, to use some of quilt's more sophisticated features. I had added patches as I discovered the need to add them, rather than organizing them by theme, but I felt it was time to tidy up. In particular I wanted to combine three patches that were performing similar actions for identical reasons into one patch.
I popped all the patches I wanted to combine off the stack, along with a whole lot of others. Then I deleted the patches from the quilt series. Then I started a new patch, added the file to be changed to that patch, applied the deleted patches, and refreshed the new patch. I had combined the three patches into one.
I really think that quilt must have a better way built in, but I have not yet figured it out. I can kind of imagine a quilt merge command. It would work like this:
The merge is complete and the new patch contains all the changes of the merged patches while the merged patches have disappeared from the series.
There is a quilt subcommand, fold, which I now find I could have used about as effectively as the technique I did use. I would have popped all but the bottommost patch that I wanted to merge and then successively quilt folded in the remaining patches.
Something that appears to be the case is that bitbake uses quilt to manage its patch process. There is no other explanation that I can come up with for the presence of a patches subdirectory containing a series file and softlinks to all my patches that I can come up with.
I popped all the patches I wanted to combine off the stack, along with a whole lot of others. Then I deleted the patches from the quilt series. Then I started a new patch, added the file to be changed to that patch, applied the deleted patches, and refreshed the new patch. I had combined the three patches into one.
I really think that quilt must have a better way built in, but I have not yet figured it out. I can kind of imagine a quilt merge command. It would work like this:
- Pop all the patches you want to merge off the stack.
- quilt new [the new patch]
- quilt merge
--- this applies these patches and deletes them from the series - quilt refresh --- the new patch is refreshed with all the changes
The merge is complete and the new patch contains all the changes of the merged patches while the merged patches have disappeared from the series.
There is a quilt subcommand, fold, which I now find I could have used about as effectively as the technique I did use. I would have popped all but the bottommost patch that I wanted to merge and then successively quilt folded in the remaining patches.
Something that appears to be the case is that bitbake uses quilt to manage its patch process. There is no other explanation that I can come up with for the presence of a patches subdirectory containing a series file and softlinks to all my patches that I can come up with.
