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I feel gentoo reduces that hassle a fair amount since you can just toss the patches in and the distro pulls them in on updates. So long as you're not messing w
by capitainenemo 3y ago
I feel gentoo reduces that hassle a fair amount since you can just toss the patches in and the distro pulls them in on updates. So long as you're not messing with APIs it's not too bad in terms of bitrot.
... I suppose you could do the same thing with debian too. You'd just need to maintain an overlay repo that rebuilds off the upstream deb sources for the packages you touched.
At that point you're pretty much doing the same thing distro's volunteer maintainer is doing. Take an upstream package, add tweaks, rebuild them automatically with tweaks on the next upstream release.
- Retr0id 3y agoI should maybe give Gentoo a second try. I last tried it on a dual-core thinkpad and it was a pretty miserable experience due to the long compile times. These days I have fast computers, and I hear Gentoo even started shipping binaries recently. I have a huge amount of respect for the work distro maintainers do. It's not especially fun or glamorous work, and many are unaware that it even happens, but it's essential.
- dvdkon 3y agoIt's similar with NixOS, patching a package is just adding a few lines in a persistent (and generally short) config file. You "only" pay for that patch by having to update it for newer versions and by compile time. The developer experience isn't as good as browser extensions yet, though. Iterating on a patch means downloading that package to a local directory and building it there, which won't be enough for, say, patches to system libraries. You have to actually apply the system configuration for that, which means recompiling.