[Oneiric-Topic] Reducing number of patches in our packages

[Robert Ancell]

On 04/07/2011 09:23 PM, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> Priority: medium?
>
> While working on the GNOME3 PPA during this cycle, I found we have a lot
> of patches in many packages, which makes things harder when upgrading to
> major versions, and also introduces new ways for the apps to fail, as
> the fixes are rebased to apply to the new upstream version.
>
> While some patches make a lot of sense, others are better kept in the
> upstream source, where the upstream developers can guarantee the quality
> accross major versions upgrades.
>
> So, for next cycle, I would suggest a "small" goal of trying to do patch
> upstreaming/cleaning days, maybe once a week or every 2 weeks.
>
> Also, some Ubuntu-specific patches, like the appindicators ones are
> duplicated in lots of packages, so it would be good if we could find a
> better way to make upstream apps use them, like, for instance, patching
> gtk_status_icon_* in GTK itself to use the indicators when available,
> instead of having to patch dozens of apps (and keep those patches
> up-to-date and working for every major version upgrade).
>
> Another candidate for that could be the launchpad integration patches,
> which are present in many more packages than the appindicators ones. I'm
> sure we can find a way to have that in GTK itself, so that whenever a
> Help menu is created, and given we have the name of the app, it could
> just create the LPI entries.
>
>
+100 for this topic.  The amount of patches we carry is a huge but
mostly silent overhead.  I'd like to make a website like versions [1]
that shows our diff against vanilla GNOME to make this more visible.

[1] http://people.canonical.com/~platform/desktop/versions.html