Strawman: eliminating debdiffs

[Reinhard Tartler]

Luca Falavigna <dktrkranz at ubuntu.com> writes:

>>   * 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

I think that is an excellent idea.

Most upstreams do have some sort of public mailing list, and the
requirement to include such a submission link in debian/changelog for
package uploads should be pretty straight forward to implement in most
cases.

OTOH, people want to get fixes in quickly, and demanding (prospective
and existing alike) developers to do such submissions is time
consuming. So you have to draw the line somewhere.

I still think that we should put more pressure on this point here. There
is a lot of talk about "ubuntu not giving back"[1], and enforcing such a
policy seems to me to be a good way to weaken this claim.



[1] I hear that most often from other debian developers, but recently
some ppl of the kernel hackers community seem to agree - no, I won't
give references.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4