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

[Jorge O. Castro]

>> 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).

How would this affect application authors, would they need to go update again?

>> 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.

This would be great, do you think GTK upstream would be keen on this?

> +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.

I would like to also +100 even though I'm not on the desktop team. :p

The 3.x transition this is the time to get this out of the way before
we find ourselves in LTS-crunch with too large a delta. When we're
ready I'd like to see us approach d-d-l as soon as possible and start
talking to module maintainers and start working on this. Even if we
don't get them all if we could at least do a frontloaded approach for
O and catch the remainder in P that would be great.