I think that with the whole packages not in debian thing we need a DD on our MOTU team and on the utnubu team - and then things would get a lot easier.
I plan to be this person some time in the future - but the Debian NM process is a long winded one :D lol But still - I dont think that utnubu are doing their jobs about getting our packages from ubuntu into debian ... which I hope to work on :D Reinhard Tartler wrote: > Hello fellow MOTUs, > > I hope you enjoyed a merry Christmas, and will have a great start in the > new Year. This mail contains some thoughts I had the last days, but I > think they are rather important, and so I'd like to share them with you. > I'm sorry that this email got rather length, I'd suggest you take > yourself a beer or a coffee in advance ;) > > When going through my uploads to dapper, I noticed that quite some > packages I touched are diverged from debian unnecessarily, so they > could/should be fixed by requesting a sync the next time an upload > appears in debian. > > What do we actually do in universe? Mostly, we are managing Divergence > from debian. Sure, some of us do have some pet packages which they care > of, and some of us are even DDs, who do work in debian on the packages. > But most of the work is divergence. Lets summarise some types of > divergence we have in ubuntu: > > * Unneeded divergence (can be synced on next debian upload) > * Different Default Python (debian has 2.3, we have 2.4) > * Newer Xorg (some build deps needs to be changed, most notably > libgl) > * different Kernel > * other kind of build depends need to be changed > * init.d file lsb conformity > * new upstreams > * Desktop file added > * Random Bugfixes > * amd64 related > * Packages not in debian (yet) > > I hope I didn't miss too much, but you get the idea. There are several > kinds of divergence, some can be fixed in debian and some rather not. > With random bugfixes and .desktop files I made good experiences with > filing whishlist bugs to the debian bts, so I think it is a very good > idea to do this. > > Since this is the core of our work what we do, I think we should > classify the diverged packages in our universe. I imagine a wiki page, > where we can mark and register what kind of divergence a given package > has. We should also note "unneeded diverged" at the top of the list, so > that this can get an easy merge (just request a sync). This task could > be done automatically in the best case. > > But also the rest of this classification is useful. Imagine what happens > when e.g. debian switches to python2.4. Then we need a list of all > packages, which we touched because of our python transition, most of > will be most probably just synced. But having that list in advance is > really useful. The same applies to other categories (like xorg) as well. > > There are other kinds of divergence, like specific diffs because of our > kernel or the new Packages that we accepted through REVU. These packages > do cause quite some work in maintenance. In oder to facilitate these > maintenance work, I'd propose that we could establish a MOTU svn > archive, so that we can manage these packages via svn-buildpackage. > Since we don't have real maintainers I think a common archive would be > most appropriate. For my own packages, I maintain them in my private svn > repo, but I would have no problem in putting them in a semi-public MOTU > svn. I beleive that others think the same. > > I hear you crying why svn, and not bzr. Well, there are some (IMO) > technical reasons against bzr. First, there is no bzr-buildpackage and > bzr-inject yet. Second, we need a central, authoritative place where all > works goes to, so that we get notified as soon as someone commits > something new. svn offers this, bzr not. > > Anyway, I think tiber should have enough resources left for hosting such > an archive. Authentication via htaccess files, so that we can hand out > access to that svn even to some of our MOTU hopefuls. > > Puh, this was a rather lengthy mail for just some thoughts, well, happy > discussion after new year. > > PS: I won't be available the first week in January, please don't break > revu and/or tiber when I'm snowboarding ;) > > -- Ubuntu-motu mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-motu
