[Mageia-dev] 26/01/2011 meeting

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
+
+