Strawman: eliminating debdiffs

[Luca Falavigna]

James Westby ha scritto:
>   * The contributor finds a fix to a problem, and forwards the
>     patch upstream. They follow the progress of the bug and
>     work with upstream to get it committed.

This should be the procedure, reporting our changes upstream (Debian,
upstream bugtracker, whatever) as long as it's applicable there ...

>   * Once the fix is committed, or some time has passed with no 
>     comment from upstream, if the contributor deems the fix
>     important enough to warrant an upload before the new upstream
>     is packaged they seek a sponsor.

... but upstream projects and Debian have different timings than ours,
we would want to push a fix to solve someone's problem ASAP, waiting for
someone to release the fix for us could lead to longer delays. Ok, we
can upload the fix directly, but we must discuss if a fix is important
enough to have it in the archives immediately or not and check
constantly if upstream committed our changes to finally close our bugs.
I'm not sure this is the right approach because it would require much
time and efforts to have it in place, what about ...

>   * The sponsor grabs the patch and reviews it, with more scrutiny
>     if there has been no comment upstream. They drop it in the
>     package and add a changelog entry, which will be easy because
>     contributors will be encouraged to provide a lot of information
>     about the fix.

... including upstream reference into the changelog entry? A link to
upstream bugtracker, VCS commit or whatever should be enough to track
status of our submitted patches, maybe enforcing [1] as our policy.

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2008-June/025551.html

Regards,

-- 
 . ''`.      Luca Falavigna
 : :'  :  Ubuntu MOTU Developer
 `. `'`     Debian Maintainer
   `-      GPG Key: 0x86BC2A50

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