Idea: review + massive sync of Debian changes not involving new upstream versions?

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi,

5 lines summary:
  For universe packages that don't have anybody looking at them, I
  propose that, instead of letting them rot after Debian Import Freeze,
  we instead review the Debian changes that don't introduce new upstream
  versions, and continue to sync them (manually) to Ubuntu to get all
  the bug fixes that happen in Debian.

--verbose version:
I think that it is obvious that, except for some small sets of packages,
most of the packages in universe are not really cared about in Ubuntu,
and are just synced from Debian, with the occasional bug fixes.

Since we are past Debian Import Freeze, fixes made in Debian no longer
migrate automatically to Ubuntu. As a result, important bug fixes might
happen in Debian without anyone on the Ubuntu side noticing.

It seems to me that it would actually result in a big improvement in
Ubuntu's quality if, instead, we just continued to sync Debian changes
in universe packages. Of course, we cannot just continue to sync all
changes until the release. But it would probably make sense to sync many
changes not involving new upstream versions, after a quick manual
review. Mistakes will probably be made (introducing new bugs), but new
uploads that don't involve a new upstream version are usually reasonably
safe, and it also means that lots of bugs will be fixed in the process.

Of course, it's already possible to do that manually. But I think that
we could use a more efficient infrastructure: there's currently no easy
way to see the list of packages that have a newer version in Debian
together with their changelog entries. And submitting a lot of sync
requests to launchpad is not very efficient.

Comments?
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas at nussbaum.fr             GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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