Re: Megapatches (Was: Lua Foundation?)

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 9:19 AM, Paige DePol <lual@serfnet.org> wrote:
> There may be a couple other tiny patches in there as well, but those are the
> major patch areas... a bit more than the 4'ish I initially estimated! ;)

I'm curious about how (semi) automated patching could become.

The background is this: I did luabuild because I wanted to create a
straightforward toolkit for creating custom versions of Lua, either
adding external modules to the core, or leaving out standard modules.
(It would then leverage soar and srlua to make standalone executables
with programs, but that is another story).  So I was thinking about
how to raise that to the next level, and allow a person to add a few
patches as well.

It's a hard problem in general because patches can trample on each
other so easily. So what's needed is some kind of compatibility matrix
so a machine could deduce what combination of patches is going to work
as expected.