> The canonical git format is “patches applied”.

How many Debian packages have patches applied to upstream?

Lots. Because many upstream projects don't have their build system set up to work within a distribution (to get dependencies form the system and to install to standard places). All distros must patch things to get them to work.

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latchup 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, there are big differences in how aggressively things are patched. Arch Linux makes a point to strictly minimize patches and avoid them entirely whenever possible. That's a good thing, because otherwise, nonsense like the Xscreensaver situation ensues, where the original developers aggressively reject distro packages for mutilating their work and/or forcing old and buggy versions on unsuspecting users.

	▲	dima55 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Huh? I contribute to Debian; I don't aggressively patch anything. You can too.

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rurban 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most, because Debian is the only distro which strictly enforces their manpages and filesystem standards. And most source packages don't care much, resp. have other ideas

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dspillett 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A fair few I expect, amongst actively developed apps/utils/libs. Away from sid (unstable) Debian packages are often a bit behind upstream but still supported, so security fixes are often back-ported if the upstream project isn't also maintaining older releases that happen to match the version(s) in testing/stable/oldstable.