* Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbh...@gentoo.org> 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: +49 36207 519931 email: weig...@metux.de mobile: +49 151 27565287 icq: 210169427 skype: nekrad666 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Embedded-Linux / Portierung / Opensource-QM / Verteilte Systeme ----------------------------------------------------------------------