[gentoo-dev] The feature patch mess in the webalizer ebuild (and how to deal with it)

[Sebastian Pipping <sping@gentoo.org>]

Hello!


Intro
=====
The latest version of webalizer is 2.01 while upstream is at 2.21 by
now.  The reason it's not been bumped in Gentoo is the two use flags
"geoip" and "xtended".

The former alone pulls in a feature patch called "geolizer", while the
latter pulls a feature patch called "webalizer xtended", either with or
without geoip support.


Problem
=======
Both of these patches have not been updated for quite some time.
To bump webalizer we would either need fresh version of both patches
or drop what's out of date which breaks the use flags.

geoip support is included in webalizer itself by now. Still, geoalizer
added a bit more than that: human-readable byte units might still be
missing.  With weblizer xtended if may be similar, at least that's my guess.


The real problem is that we have an ebuild depending on feature patches.
 Even if we had updated patches by now it were a question of time only
until the symptoms return.


Solution
========
1) Add two new packages to the tree:
   - app-admin/geolizer (/usr/bin/geolizer)
   - app-admin/webalizer-xtended (/usr/bin/webalizer-xtended)

2) Bump webalizer to 2.21 while
  - no longer applying either feature patch
  - removing use flag "xtended"
  - keeping now hollow use flag "geoip" to reduce breakage

3) Close related bug 231859
   https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=231859

I volunteer to do that.

Any objections or suggestions?


Side note
=========
If anyone feels like playing around with merging changes from webalizer
into geolizer (and maybe geolizer-based webalizer xtended) he is welcome
to do that on top a dedicated Git repository for it:

  http://git.goodpoint.de/?p=webalizer.git;a=summary

Contact me if that sounds like a job for you.  Geolizer upstream is more
likely to migrate anytime soon, so checking back with Stanislaw Pusep
again before would be good.



Sebastian