About forwarding bugs and patches to Debian and documenting your changes

[Martin Pitt]

Hi Lucas,

Lucas Nussbaum [2008-06-17 12:52 +0200]:
> As you might have read in [1], I worked on exporting more info about
> packages in Ubuntu to the Debian infrastructure, specifically the Debian
> PTS[2] and the Debian Developer Packages Overview[3].

Thanks for pushing this. I read the flamew^Wthread...

> I know you are over-busy, etc., and that your #1 priority can't be to
> push changes back to Debian.  But those changes should not replace
> submitting bugs to the Debian BTS, like the patches on patches.u.c
> should not replace submitting patches to the BTS.

Full ack here, and I do think that it should be common practice and a
requirement to push changes back to upstream/Debian. It helps so much
on merges and long-term maintenance, really, so it's in our own
interest to do so. Everybody who had to do a merge of a package with
ancient underdocumented fixes which were done by other people in the
past will know what I mean.

> Secondly, you generally could improve a lot at documenting your changes.
> If you put more effort on properly documenting what you change in your
> packages, it would allow Debian developers to understand why you made a
> specific change, and they would be a lot more likely to merge the change
> in the Debian package (which means less work for you during the next
> merge).

Likewise for other Ubuntu developers, see above. :-)

> It would be great if, in addition to listing the remaining changes in
> the last changelog entry, you could also list for each change:
> - the URL of the corresponding Ubuntu bug (if any)
> - the URL of the corresponding upstream bug (if any)
> - the URL of the corresponding Debian bug (if any)
> - a summary of the changes (pointing to URLs explaining the context of
>   the change, if possible/needed)
> - whether the change is Ubuntu-specific, or should be merged upstream
>   or in Debian (with a rationale if it's Ubuntu-specific)

If it's a proper patch, this documentation should go into the patch
itself (using tags, as you say), then the changelog doesn't need to be
cluttered with metadata about the patch. For packaging-only changes
that should be done in the changelog. However, for readability I think
that "Debian #1234" suffices, we shouldn't put in long URLs for
well-known bug trackers.

> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/PatchTaggingGuidelines about
> basically the same thing (it documents the changes in the patches, which
> is not suitable if the changes are made directly in the source, without
> using a patch system), but that policy doesn't seem to be in widespread
> use, unfortunately.

Right, it originally was invented as a way to handle patches in the
GNOME desktop team, but personally I find those really useful, and I
am using them for my packages as well now. Also when sending patches to
upstream, they have all the necessary information in one place.

Thanks, Lucas!

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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