Re: [gentoo-dev] [[e-mail]: [Bug 322157] [mail-filter/procmail] new ebuild + autocreate maildirs]

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@g.o> schrieb:

> If I understand your system correctly, you essentially maintain clones
> of upstream repos, with all the various distro patches applied on top,
> and release tarballs as well.

Yes. And if some upstream does not provide suitable vcs access
(or doesnt even have one), I make an pseudo-upstream branch by
committing the release source trees.

> I don't see how these various distros can be made to agree with
> each other and I certainly can't see them using a common tarball
> source.

Thats not even necessary. They just should use the infrastructure,
as described in my paper. So everyone can easily set up automatic
notifications, cherry-pick, etc, etc.

> On a technical level, it's got serious security, trust, and
> redundancy problems.

Git makes that very easy ;-p

> It is extremely important that distros collaborate in some form
> when it comes to patches that *can* be shared,

If we're doing a good job (my generic fixes instead of distro-
specfic dirty hacks) about 99% can be shared ;-p

> but the solution you have devised is fundamentally flawed.

If it's really flawed, then just for pure "social" reasons, no
serious technical ones.

> A practical solution to the problem of patch sharing is to
> have a website with a search interface for upstream source
> tarballs, which can display all the patches that various
> distros apply, as well as a download link for the patchsets
> (hotlinked to the distro files where possible).

Too complicated, and actually would not help me a single bit.
What I could offer is an (semi-)automatic import mechanism 
(assuming certain package managers dont do such insane things 
like directly sed'ing sources etc) - there's still a bunch of
work to do for that, but its possible.

> Distro packagers are much more comfortable with downloading
> patchsets from a foreign source than complete tarballs.

man git-format-patch ;-p

Maybe I could set up an git webfrontend (or automatically push
to some public service). 

> I know you have spent a lot of time on this already, but please
> understand it from where we stand. We're short on manpower, and
> there's no real benefits of shifting our tarball source; OTOH there
> are major disadvantages too unless we pitch in with manpower
> ourselves. And honestly speaking, that manpower is better spent making
> stuff work locally.

Well, Gentoo is short of manpower ? hmm, perhaps some should think
about why so many folks are resigning and so few fresh coming in
(at least according to this lists traffic) ;-O

> Please consider the "patch-website" idea above. We definitely need
> someone to code it up, gather the source-package to distro patches
> mappings, and advertise it.

Actually, I once had somehing in that area, called "comprehensive
source database", but unfurtinately it got lost in an disk array
crash a few years ago, and I didnt find the time to rewrite it yet.

Meanwhile I dont need it anymore, since I gave up maintaining
plaintext patches in favour of git. And that makes my daily works
_much_ easier.

Oh, btw: I'm announcing my oss-qm releases via twitter:

    http://twitter.com/oss_qm


cu
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service -- http://www.metux.de/

 phone:  [phone]  email: weigelt@×××××.de
 mobile: [phone]  icq:   210169427         skype: nekrad666
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Embedded-Linux / Portierung / Opensource-QM / Verteilte Systeme
----------------------------------------------------------------------