RFC: upstreaming debian/patches/exec_filename_* and the dde stuff

[Justus Winter]

Hi,

I'd like to see more of the debian/patches merged, especially the
exec_filename_* series.  These patches cover a lot of files, and they
often break and I have to amend them manually.  More often than not
the fix is trivial, but it is still a nuisance.  I'd also like to see
the dde stuff from the incubator repository merged upstream.

1/ Code that does not live in the Hurd repository receives less
attention.  I've been doing a lot of cleanups, static analysis and
performance improvements lately.  The dde stuff for example has not
received any of those.

2/ The nice Guix folks surely also want all those goodies, so they
either have to copy those patches, or they miss out.  In either way, I
feel like we (Hurd upstream) would have failed them.

3/ I feel that this situation creates an unnecessary drag for the
development.  I'm working on protected payloads to improve the object
lookups in the Hurd servers.  I've just came up with a patch that
fixes some object lookups in libports.  This requires changing the API
of libports.  I fixed all the code in the Hurd repository accordingly,
unfortunately the dde stuff breaks if it isn't fixed as well.  If it
was living in the same repository, I could fix it up in one commit,
making sure that the change is atomic.

So, is the dde stuff a first class citizen?  If so, I believe it
should be merged.  If not, may I change the API of, say, libports
freely?  May I merge that patch that breaks the dde servers?  If not,
why not, and what is the best way to proceed?

Cheers,
Justus