MOTU-and-Debian meeting?

[Matt Galvin]

On 6/4/05, Brandon Hale <brandon at smarterits.com> wrote:
> I have said a couple times that I think other MOTUs should adopt my
> policy of coordinating as many changes as possible with the Debian
> maintainer. 

Just my 2 cents, but I agree with this 110% and although I am not an
MOTU (yet, hopefully soon :) I have already started doing this and
find that the more we talk to each other(either by technical methods
and/or personally one-to-one) the better. It allows both sides to
benifit from each others work. I even became the new Debian maintainer
for a package and am having my Debian uploads sponsored by the
packages previous maintainer, just because I said, Hi I'd like to
help. Now we are working together to make sure the package works in
Ubuntu and Debian while I will being doing most of the work in Ubuntu.

> I think we should have a meeting to come up with a way to coordinate as
> much as possible our changes back to Debian, without expecting their
> maintainers to regularly check MOM patches.

One thing I ran into already was that I built this package and made
sure it worked on Ubuntu, but didn't do a test build on a regular
Debian system. Which means that my fixes/updates needed to be double
checked to ensure it would build and work on plain Debian. My sponsor
did this since he is still going to be co-maintainer and is still
acting as my bridge into debian for uploads (which went well by the
way :).

My point/idea is, what about having a regular Debian system in the
build farm so that when a package builds successfully on Ubuntu it
then gets built on Debian to make sure it works(er, builds) in both
places. This would allow us to say, hey it works(at least builds) on
Debian too, and the Debian maintainer/teams would have less stuff to
check. If it doesn't work we have build logs that tell us why it
didn't work.

If it works on Ubuntu but not Debian, it would not prevent it from
getting into Ubuntu, but would make us more aware of what we can do to
help get it working in Debian also. Weather we do that extra work will
probably be on a case by case basis, but we would still have a better
idea, and is additional information we can share at very least.

I know this would require some extra resources, at least another build
machine or two, but would help us konw more of what to expect in terms
of what changes may need to be made, if any.

It could help find some problems quicker, helping to get the updated
or new packages into Debian faster, helping prevent some conflicts
which can potentially cut down on some conflict issues as we import
debian packages and move to new releases in the future.

It's late and I did 8 hours of driving today so if any of this doesn't
make sense :-/, feel free to ask me to explain better.

Just a though...

Hope this helps,

Matt

> Thanks for your ideas!
> Brandon Hale
> 
> 
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