The pager patch is a bit silly but that’s just the Debian way of doing things. If upstream breaks the patch then it would take about 2 minutes to fix. No big deal.

The Azureus thing is pretty stupid, since 2.5.0 is very old indeed. :/

Anyway, keep up the good work!

You must download and build everything under Gentoo, leaving you to specify compiler options and every other aspect of the software that you use.

What is the reasoning behind patching the official source code? The reasoning is that distributions all have their own little ways of doing things.

Let’s look at another example: git, the SCM system.
The official Ubuntu version is : 1:1.5.2.5
I updated git and I am running : 1:1.5.3.8
There’s a patch in the package that will change the source_code of pager.c
@@ -39,7 +39,7 @@ void setup_pager(void)
if (!pager)
pager = getenv(”PAGER”);
if (!pager)
- pager = “less”;
+ pager = “pager”;
else if (!*pager || !strcmp(pager, “cat”))
return;

So they replace the the command less with pager only because in Ubuntu pager is set as an alternative to whatever you want it to be:
/bin/more -or-
/usr/bin/pg -or-
/usr/bin/less -or-
/usr/bin/w3m

As far as I know the command less comes with a default installation. So why would you want to create this patch? If Ubuntu wouldn’t use something like pager this patch would be unnecessary, which I believe it is anyway but that’s beside the point. What if the git developers decided to dramatically change the pager.c? The maintainer of the Ubuntu package needs to start creating another patch.

One more example: Azureus
Ubuntu’s official version: 2.5.0
I believe they aren’t updating to a newer version because they created a humongous patch that changes the source code so Azureus can’t automatically update itself. When i started with Ubuntu I downloaded the official Azureus release and it has been updating automatically without any problems I’m running 3.0.4.2 right now.

I know why they create patches but it holds you back in the updating process and that’s why I wondered if there is a vanilla Linux distribution that runs all vanilla software.

“Why? Because of patches created for other programs that interact with Pidgin.
The whole update process would be way quicker if the Linux distribution would be able to run unpatched programs. ”

Correct, it would be easier if the software had less functionality.