[Mageia-dev] 26/01/2011 meeting

Michael scherer misc at zarb.org
Wed Feb 9 10:27:46 CET 2011


On Wed, Feb 09, 2011 at 12:22:59AM +0200, Ahmad Samir wrote:
> On 8 February 2011 08:21, Cazzaniga Sandro <cazzaniga.sandro at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Le 07/02/2011 22:11, Ahmad Samir a écrit :
> >>
> >> Personally, as I said before about upstreaming patches, I don't think
> >> I have enough experience to judge if a patch should go upstream or
> >> not, so that part I can't do.
> >>
> >> What do you mean by "commented"?
> >
> > A thing like:
> >
> > #patch from .... to fix truc
> > Patch0: glibc-2.12-truc.fix.patch
> >
> 
> That's usually available in the svn log, whoever wrote the patch
> should have commented it if that is the policy, however I am not aware
> that such a policy exists (IMBW though).

There is no specific policy despites the matter being discussed some time
ago, but to me, this is the only way to know what was send upstream
and what wasn't. 

It is ok if someone is not sure to send upstream or not,
but we cannot know if this is not written. And searching the svn log is tedious, 
people usually say "add patch to fix stuff", without giving the name. And you
have to search for every patch, and nobody ever say what is the upstream
status of the patch.

So writing in the spec, just before the patch what it does, if it was sent
upstream, and where ( or why it shouldn't ) allow to quickly see the status.

For example, I found while cleaning newt that some patches where never send
to developpers ( and so I did ), that 2 patchs were wrong.

So we cannot assumed that it was send back, even when we take the file from another 
distribution.

I started working on a prototype of a web interface to manage this ( called ghostwheel ),
but it requires some functions on sophie to work ( and didn't had time to code them ).
( a django web application, so far it does nothing except declaring a db and having a
cool name ).

If we do not comment and send upstream, we will end up with rpm like gdb :

When you look at it ( http://svnweb.mageia.org/packages/cauldron/gdb/current/SPECS/gdb.spec?revision=21081&view=markup ),
the patch 320 ( and others ) that seems to come from gdb 6.5, you see there is something fishy
since we are now running gdb 7.1. Some seems to be linked to bugzilla ( no mention of the url
of the bz ), but does it mean they were sent uptream or not ?
The various format-security patches, etc, should also be commented
and send upstream. The patches about IA64 should maybe have been cleaned, etc.

Ask teuf why it took so long to upgrade gdb :)
-- 
Michael Scherer



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