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

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
+