The qemu package includes a special maintenance workflow in order to support git based patching. Please use it in order to have changes you make be acceptable to the package maintainers. Currently a local clone of the upstream repo(s) is required for the packaging workflow. It is anticipated that the need for any extra setup will be reduced or even eliminated entirely in the future, but for now, you will need do so some setup. See config.sh for details. The qemu.spec file is generated from a qemu.spec.in template, so to make changes to the spec file beyond the patch name generation, patch reference and automated versioning done by the scripts, you need to edit the template. Do not directly edit the spec file. The spec file's version and patch references are added when the update_git.sh script is passed certain commands, as described below. If you are not modifying any patches or their order, but just need to update the spec file from a changed template, run 'bash ./update_git.sh refresh'. If the set of patches is being modified, including their order, you will want to first run 'bash ./update_git.sh pkg2git', which makes the current package patch queue available in a local git branch named frombundle (see config.sh for the locations). This set of patches comes from a "bundle of git bundles", the bundles.tar.xz file, which is included as a package source file. You will then create an altered patch queue in the branch which corresponds to this release (eg: opensuse-5.0), using the frombundle branch as the starting point for your changes (eg perhaps start by doing git reset --hard frombundle, then cherry-pick upstream patches from there). Once you have the patch queue ready to go run 'bash ./update_git.sh git2pkg' which updates the bundles.tar.xz file, as well as the spec and patch files. The default action for update_git.sh is git2pkg, which helps simplify repeated package updates as you modify the patch queue from the local git repo. The maintainer and automation use another workflow mode dealing with packaging the latest upstream qemu. See 'LATEST' references in the scripts for details. * * * * * * * * * Additional Notes: Patches which are from an upstream git repo should have the commit id recorded just below the Subject line (after a blank line) as follows: Git-commit: <40-char-sha-id> If a patch is anticipated to be shortly included in upstream repo, mark that fact by doing the above with 40 0's, which will flag it as needing to be updated in the near future. Bug or feature tracking identifiers should also be added to the patch similarly, using the abbreviations identified here: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Packaging_Patches_guidelines#Current_set_of_abbreviations using the "Reference:" tag, with multiple entries comma separated. The ability to provide a conditional inclusion of a patch (eg based on architecture, is provided by using the "Include-If:" tag similarly, as follows: Include-If: %ifarch aarch64 This will cause the patch application in the spec file to be done as follows: %ifarch aarch64 %patch0013 -p1 %endif A trick worth noting is, if a given git tracked patch is to be applied in a way that can't be done in the normal patching section of the spec file, you can still include the patch, and use it by name with the patch program elsewhere in the spec file by doing something such as: Include-If: %if 0%{?patch-possibly-applied-elsewhere} (this variable will remain undefined in the spec file) And then elsewhere in the spec file, the actual patch (eg specially-handled-change.patch) is referenced as eg: patch -p1 < %_sourcedir/specially-handled-change.patch