Patching an Existing Debian Package

This tutorial walks you through patching an existing Debian package. It is useful if you want to create a .deb of a package after fixing some bug or modifying the source in any other way. We will use hugin as our example.

We start by fetching the source package.

$ apt-get source hugin
$ cd hugin-2017.0.0+dfsg

We will need a tool named quilt to make the process easier.

# apt install quilt

Before using quilt, we want to make it aware of the debian/patches directory, which holds the patches. Adding the following lines to ~/.quiltrc will make quilt search up the directory tree for the debian/patches directory.

d=. ; while [ ! -d $d/debian -a `readlink -e $d` != / ]; do d=$d/..; done
if [ -d $d/debian ] && [ -z $QUILT_PATCHES ]; then
        # if in Debian packaging tree with unset $QUILT_PATCHES
        QUILT_PATCHES="debian/patches"
        QUILT_PATCH_OPTS="--reject-format=unified"
        QUILT_DIFF_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index --color=auto"
        QUILT_REFRESH_ARGS="-p ab --no-timestamps --no-index"
        QUILT_COLORS="diff_hdr=1;32:diff_add=1;34:diff_rem=1;31:diff_hunk=1;33:diff_ctx=35:diff_cctx=33"
        if ! [ -d $d/debian/patches ]; then mkdir $d/debian/patches; fi
fi

Now the actual patching process starts. The patches are applied in series, and our new patch should be the last one. We start by applying any existing patches and then creating a new patch.

$ quilt push -a
$ quilt new 44_setlocale.patch

I chose the 44_ prefix because hugin already has a patch named 43_fallbackhelp.patch, and the convention is to name patches so the names reflect the order in which they are applied. Next, we specify to quilt which files we modify, and then we edit them.

$ quilt add src/hugin1/hugin/huginApp.cpp
$ vim src/hugin1/hugin/huginApp.cpp

Alternatively, instead of editing the files manually, quilt import can be used to import an existing patch.

Each patch comes with its own metadata to let other people know who wrote it and what it does. Use

$ quilt header --dep3 -e

to edit this metadata. For example:

Description: Call setlocale()
This fixes a bug in wxExecute, see https://trac.wxwidgets.org/ticket/16206
The patch has been submitted to upstream, https://groups.google.com/d/msg/hugin-ptx/FCi7ykPDZ5E/3w8E5U1SCQAJ
Author: Guy Rutenberg <guyrutenberg@gmail.com>
Last-Update: 2017-10-04
---
This patch header follows DEP-3: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/
See [DEP-3](http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/) for more details about the different fields.

After we finish editing, we finalize the patch and unapply all the patches.

$ quilt refresh
$ quilt pop -a

Now, you can continue to build the deb from source as usual. We use debchange to create a new version and debuild to build the package. After the package is built, it can be installed using debi.

$ DEBEMAIL="Guy Rutenberg <guyrutenberg@gmail.com>" debchange --nmu
$ debuild -us -uc -i -I -j7

Sources:

• UsingQuilt