[Mageia-dev] please stop doing "bugs" for updating magia 1

Christian Lohmaier lohmaier+mageia at googlemail.com
Wed Jan 11 21:53:48 CET 2012


On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 6:43 PM, Juan Luis Baptiste <juancho at mageia.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 11:48 AM, Christian Lohmaier
> <lohmaier+mageia at googlemail.com> wrote:
> [...]
> You don't do packaging, right ?

Wrong. I do packaging, although not for any distro.

> it isn't that hard and is how all distro's do it. Look at Fedora or
> SuSE's packages and you will see a lot of patch files fixing single
> bugs.

adding patches to the packages and releasing them instead of waiting
for a new upstream release is different from having the policy to
stick with whatever release was used when releasing the distro and
then only apply fixes via patches.

I'm not saying that you must not use patches to fix bugs. There are
cases where a bug is homegrown/specific to the distro and thus not
suitable for fixing upstream, there are cases where development cylce
is too slow/it is not sensible to wait for upstream.

> It's a matter of following upstream bugzilla reports and see
> which commit fixes the issue in question, create a patch from it and
> apply it to the package. Most of the time you can get the patches to
> fix single bugs from other distros packages.

It is not a question whether it is possible. It is a question whether
it makes sense in the first place.
And no doubt it creates a lot more work for package maintainers.
Both for initially hunting for the commit that fixes the bug, and
later when patches conflict, and later when a package is updated to a
new release.

> Because as I said earlier, we backport the "commit" that fixes that
> single issue,

Every change, also those that introduce a regression is a "commit".
So implicitly you're saying that you will only fix the "easy" bugs,
but anything that involves more than touching 10lines of code will not
be chosen, since it might introduce regressions.

ciao
Christian


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