[Mageia-dev] Putting meta-information in Mageia patches

[Olav Vitters]

Hello,

I'm busy filing upstream bugs for every patch in packages which source
is hosted on ftp.gnome.org.

There are 300 of such patches... and it is getting difficult to keep
track of what I've filed and the status and so on. This as some patches
have already been upstreamed, some have been taken from upstream, some
have been implemented differently, etc.

I'd like to add some meta-information to each of the 300 patches to make
it easier for me to determine if the patch has been submitted upstream
or not.

Some patches will always be Mageia specific, I want to store that in the
meta-information as well.

Quickly looking into how to store this meta-information, I found that
Debian and Ubuntu have a specification for it:
  http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/

It provides the following standard headers (quoting):
- Description or Subject (required)
- Origin (required except if Author is present)
- Bug-<Vendor> or Bug (optional)
- Forwarded (optional)
  Any value other than "no" or "not-needed" means that the patch has
  been forwarded upstream. Ideally the value is an URL proving that it
  has been forwarded and where one can find more information about its
  inclusion status.
- Author or From (optional)
- Reviewed-by or Acked-by (optional)
- Last-Update (optional)
- Applied-Upstream (optional)
  This field can be used to document the fact that the patch has been
  applied upstream. It may contain the upstream version expected to
  contain this patch, or the URL or commit identifier of the upstream
  commit (with commit identifiers prefixed with "commit:", as in the
  Origin field), or both separated by a comma and a space.


This specification basically does everything that I need and more.

Is some kind of patch-tracking or meta-information used in Mageia?

If not, do people agree that this Debian/Ubuntu specification is a good
idea?


I'd like everyone to agree, because I'm filing bugs no matter whom the
maintainer is. I will add the meta-information to patches where I am not
the maintainer if people agree on above specification.



FYI

List of bugs filed atm:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669872
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669873
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669875
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669876
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669877
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669878
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669879
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669882
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669881 (wontfixed)
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669883 (fixed differently in master)
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669874
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=669897
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13254
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13255
http://bugzilla.abisource.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13256

also committed a few string formatting fixes.

-- 
Regards,
Olav