NAME

       dh_gnulib_patch - debhelper gnulib patcher

SYNOPSIS

       dh_gnulib_patch

DESCRIPTION

       dh_gnulib_patch will apply patches to a gnulib directory.  The gnulib git clone is assumed to be in the
       current working directory.

       The purpose of dh_gnulib_patch is to apply patches to fix bugs in gnulib code.  This script will be
       invoked in a gnulib git clone directory with the git commit intended to be used checked out.  It is
       usually invoked from a debian/rules makefile as part of building a package.  The idea is that this script
       is invoked before the gnulib code content is actually used to build some other piece of software, thereby
       allowing the script to patch any security problems in the code before it is compiled.

       This script should work on ALL git commits of gnulib, or at least ALL git commits of gnulib that are
       relevant for building other packages that depend on gnulib.  If code that we want to patch has changed in
       gnulib over time, this script needs to figure out how to patch any version of that code.

       It is expected that this script will only be used to fix serious gnulib bugs that affect many packages
       that uses code from gnulib.  All packages that vendor gnulib files without using dh_gnulib_patch will
       have to be patched directly instead (although please consider converting the packages to use
       dh_gnulib_patch in the process).

       It is important that this script always perform at least one modification to the gnulib git clone tree.
       We patch gnulib-tool to modify the --version output to achieve this.  The reason is that some gnulib
       scripts uses git "describe output" to influence other decisions, and we want to always trigger the dirty
       git describe.  Otherwise the dirty git describe code path may be untested up until we need to use this
       mechanism, where it potentially could break and causing hard to resolve build failures.

FILES

       Currently the script iterates through a conf.d-style directory path under
       /usr/share/gnulib/debian/patches.d/ asserting that at least one patch from each directory applies
       cleanly, ignoring patches that does not apply cleanly (assuming they were intended for some other gnulib
       git commit).  This is anticipated to be sufficient to solve most problems, but this script could do
       anything it like to make sure patches are applied, including explicit file modications without going
       through patches.

RETURN VALUE

       Returns 0 on success and non-zero on failures.

SEE ALSO

       debhelper(7), dh(1), gnulib-tool(1).

AUTHOR

       Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>

20250303-1                                         2025-03-08                                 DH_GNULIB_PATCH(1)