shipping distribution-specific patches *separately*

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Hi!

Quoting a paragraph from:
http://lwn.net/Articles/283030/

Debian's packaging policy resembles that of most other distributions.
A Debian source package is supposed to contain a tarball of the
upstream source distribution, without changes. Any
distribution-specific patches are included separately and applied
when the source package is prepared for building.

Do we have a policy that all patches we apply in our packages need to be included *separately*? (I couldn't find anything like that in our guidelines, but maybe I missed it) And if not: Do we want such a statement in our guidelines?

Background: I wanted to use grub as provided by Fedora on a FAT partition. That didn't work properly, as the Fedora grub includes this patch:
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rpms/grub/F-7/grub-0.93-configfile.patch?view=markup

The main part of it (¹):

-	.string "/boot/grub/menu.lst"
+	.string "/boot/grub/grub.conf"

That of course creates trouble, as FAT due to its 8.3 filemane limitations can't store a file called grub.conf. Thus I had to build a special grub where this patch wasn't applied. That was no big deal and at least for me a easy thing to do.

In F8 and later that's way harder, as there is one patch (created from git afaics) where all the patches that in F-7 were applied separately are now merged into one giant 1,6 MByte big patch:
http://cvs.fedora.redhat.com/viewcvs/rpms/grub/F-8/grub-fedora-8.patch?view=markup
Building grub without that one patch of course is way harder now, as I need to get my hands on that one patch and revert it after the giant patch was applied. Not impossible, but way harder if one doesn't know where to find that one small patch to revert it.

Do we care or do we want to ignore this (minor) issue?

CU
knurd

(¹) Side note: I think it's wrong to add such a patch, as differing from upstream in things like config file naming just creates trouble and confusion for everyone.

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