Packaging: document dynamic application of patches

Both of the issues in the OP are done and deployed, so this can happen any time.

geerlingguy added the following to Packaging a profile on drupal.org on January 15 or 16, for the drupal-org.make file:

; You can also include patches in your profile by using a patch key
; for the project to be patched.
projects[adminrole][patch][] = "http://drupal.org/files/issues/adminrole_exceptions.patch"

Is that enough? Maybe adding that the patch URL should begin with "http://drupal.org/files".

BTW, an interesting real life example is Acquia Commons. Until Commons 6.x-2.3 (2011-11-03), they included a PATCHES.txt file in the profile, with a list of patches such as:

VIEWS
--------------
Issue: http://drupal.org/node/571234 
Fix: http://drupal.org/node/571234#comment-3122678

Since Commons 6.x-2.4 (2012-01-18), they include instead a drupal_commons.make file (not drupal-org.make yet) with for example:

projects[views][subdir] = "contrib"

; http://drupal.org/node/402944#comment-4650020
projects[views][patch][] = "http://drupal.org/files/issues/views-402944-31.patch"

From manual to automatic. Congrats! Given the date of the change, it looks like this is a just a step, and they are probably preparing to use drupal-org.make, maybe for the next release 6.x-2.5, hopefully.

In fact, they said in October about their plans:

Moving to Drush make

(...)

In the long run, packaging with Drush make leaves open the possibility of packaging Commons so that it can be downloaded entirely from Drupal.org.

However, until some Drupal.org infrastructural blockers are removed, we’ll continue to package new releases of Commons for download from Acquia.com.

(Moving Commons to Drupal.org)

Adding a documentation tag for distributions.

We aren't using Documentation issue reports to report problems with Community Documentation pages any more. I added a link to this issue as a comment on the page. Please feel free to edit the page! (per http://drupal.org/node/1204344 and http://drupal.org/node/1421874)

In this case, I think a group of several people are discussing some updates to a group of documentation, so let's leave this open until they're done with those issues.

About the current drupal-org.make comment from Packaging a profile on drupal.org mentioned above (#2):

; You can also include patches in your profile by using a patch key
; for the project to be patched.
projects[adminrole][patch][] = "http://drupal.org/files/issues/adminrole_exceptions.patch"

possibly a more detailed phrasing could be:

; You can also include patches in your profile by using a patch key
; for the project to be patched. Any patches applied to a given
; package release are displayed on the release node.
; Patch URLs need to start with "http://drupal.org/files/".
projects[adminrole][patch][] = "http://drupal.org/files/issues/adminrole_exceptions.patch"

Would that be enough for this issue?

Also, while we are adding this, we could update the title of the handbook page from "Packaging a profile on drupal.org" to "Packaging a profile as a distribution on drupal.org".

It seems that page is being restructured since yesterday. Now, this possible issue fix would apply to the new subpage Full example drupal-org.make file.

I just updated Full example drupal-org.make file with some of juan_g's proposed text here. Also, both this example .make file page and Packaging a distribution on Drupal.org itself have sections about drupal-org-core.make files if you need to patch core. And, the main docs page mentions patches and the requirement that they live on d.o.

Therefore, I think this is sufficiently documented. Calling this fixed.

Yay,
-Derek

Yeah Docs Team!