About forwarding bugs and patches to Debian and documenting your changes

[Scott Kitterman]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:46:46 +0200 Lucas Nussbaum 
<lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net> wrote:
>On 17/06/08 at 22:10 -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
>> On Tuesday 17 June 2008 21:11, Nicolas Valcarcel wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Lucas Nussbaum 
<lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net>
>> 
>> > > There's a wiki page on
>> > > 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.
>> >
>> > I didn't knew about that page and i'm sure a lot of people doesn't know
>> > also, are you interested on helping me dive into wiki pages to write a
>> > complete document with all of them and then try to spread the word 
about
>> > it/them? Did someone want to help?
>> 
>> We have https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ContributingToDebian that would 
presumably be 
>> the right place to start.
>
>I disagree: the change I'm suggesting is not about "being nice to
>Debian". If you improve the documentation of your changes, you will
>help yourself (Ubuntu) first. Almost two years ago, I proposed to switch
>from a simple "Merged with Debian" entry in changelog, to listing the
>various changes in the top changelog entry[0]. I think this was a
>success, and this only pushes things further.

I agree that was a success and a very good change for Ubuntu.  

As an Ubuntu developer (that's generally familiar with where to find bugs 
in Launchpad and BTS), I don't see a lot of benefit within Ubuntu for this 
last lot of suggestions.  Getting more stuff from Ubuntu back into Debian 
does benefit Ubuntu, but I don't think better debian/changelogs in Ubuntu 
will help much..

In my experience, reactions to the diff available on PTS are rare.  If I 
want something feed back to Debian, I almost invariably have to put a bug 
in BTS with the patch.  I can explain the rationale there.

Scott K