On Sun, 2019-12-22 at 16:39 +0700, Vadim A. Misbakh-Soloviov wrote:
> HI there!
> 
> Some time ago I invented patches.eclass, which facilitates my work with 
> patches, and I would like you to express your opinion about it and whether it 
> is worth committing in gentoo repo.
> 
> Maybe it’s even worth it to become a helper, but not an eclass, or be bundled 
> somewhere in existing eclasses/helpers.
> 

No.  This is just awful implicit magic.  While I understand that you
believe it makes the work easier for *you* but you are not going to be
the only person ever to touch ebuilds you are maintaining today.  You
are talking of creating a complex directory structure which might or
might not affect every ebuild, in hardly predictable ways.

Sometimes you won't be able to fit a patch in any of the categories. 
Then you're going to needlessly duplicate it in multiple directories,
triggering CI warnings for duplicate files.

Sometimes you will have to jump through hoops to change patching order,
so that every subdirectory works correctly.

Grepping the ebuilds for applicable files from FILESDIR just won't work.
Sure, maybe the proposed structure will be more convenient for cleanup. 
Unless people accidentally remove whole FILESDIR because they don't see
any reference to it.

Until this is widely deployed (which is unlikely to happen), people will
get very confused over every ebuild using it.

Finally, this can only bring real gain if you carry a lot of patches. 
In that case, I'd really prefer if you put them into a tarball, and into
SRC_URI rather than polluting all the Gentoo installations.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny