Strawman: eliminating debdiffs

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 10:27:49AM +0100, James Westby wrote:
> My proposal would be to discourage debdiffs for this sort of fix.
> Instead I propose the following:
> 
>   * 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.
>   * For small fixes the process will stop 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.
>   * A sponsorship request is a description of the problem and the
>     fix and a pointer to the bug report and/or commit upstream.
>   * 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.

Guiding contributors to work with upstream is a good idea, but I don't think
we should block all contribution on a successful engagement with upstream.
Some upstreams are dead, on holidays, impossible to work with, etc.  Some
Ubuntu bugs are much more urgent for Ubuntu than for upstream.

I would be interested to find more light-touch ways that we could encourage
involvement upstream without preventing people from making a useful
contribution.

-- 
 - mdz