[ubuntu-marketing] Making Canonical's/Ubuntu's contributions more visible

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 7:07 AM, Bryce Harrington <bryce at canonical.com> wrote:
> 3.  $ sudo apt-get build
>
>    Run from within the source tree, this wrappers all the work of
>    generating a patch from the current source tree's changes and adding
>    it to the package's patch management system (or adding a patch
>    management system if one doesn't exist), running debuild, set up a
>    pbuilder environment if needed, run pbuilder to produce the
>    (unsigned) debs, and place them in the parent directory.

I think debuild already makes a diff.gz. (It would also be nice if,
when doing the share, it would have some way of filtering out the
weird temp files that can appear in a source tree.)

>    Would be nice to not have to run it as root, but not sure that
>    there's an easy way of running pbuilder as non-root.

There is pbuilder-uml, but that doesn't count as "easy" ;)

Using some from of filesystem virtualisation like Plash may also work,
and it would be nice to be able test the package in a sandbox. A
rather lightweight sandbox would be to let the application run with
Copy-on-write access to the /. This may not suitable for all packages,
but there could be a list of ways that a package could be sandboxed.

> 4.  $ apt-get share [bug id | package-name]
>
>    Like you mention, presents user with a list of their outstanding
>    patches applicable for the given bug or package (or all in the
>    system), prompts for annotation, allows gpg-signing, and uploads to
>    the appropriate place.  Maybe a PPA, or maybe sending directly to a
>    Launchpad bug ID, with request to add to ubuntu and/or debian.
>
> Of course, the above paints over a huge amount of implementational
> complexity.  Perhaps this could only be achieved for certain well-formed
> packages.

Perhaps when one comes across a non-well-formed package one could fix
it and do an apt-get share :)

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia