Ubuntu bug repport for DTC & implication in development of our package in Ubuntu

[James Westby]

On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 22:12 +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
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> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm the upstream main developer of this web hosting control panel. We
> work mainly under Debian Etch, and I have managed to have our package
> uploaded into Debian SID. I believe it will soon migrate to Lenny.
> 

Hi,

> I was quite happily surprised to see that my package was in Ubuntu
> Gusty. Unfortunately, this is a quite old version, but I'm happy of it
> still.
> 
> The reason why I'm writing now, is that I want to know if it was
> possible to have my email address associated with any bug report against
> our package.

If you go to 

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dtc

and click "Subscribe to bug mail" in the top left you can do this.

> 
> I don't really know Ubuntu, I have never installed it to be honest, so I
> don't know about your procedures. I know it's a quite good distribution
> based on Debian, and that many of my friend use it. But that's about it.
> I have still registered for a launchpad account with my Debian
> maintainer email address (the one I'm using currently). Is it enough
> trust to have my key signed by a Debian developer? I'd appreciate some
> pointer on how to register to have any bug reports sent to me.
> 

You don't need a GPG key to get a launchpad account.

> Also, is it possible to have the latest SID version included in Ubuntu?
> It's of much better quality than the 0.25 that I could see in Gusty, and
> I believe that it corrects many bugs. See our latest packages here:
> 

gutsy is released, and so the version there can't be updated. The 
current development version is hardy, which has the same version of
the package.

Hardy is currently in feature freeze, and so a new upstream is not
allowed to come straight in.

You can see the process for getting an exception to this in the
Universe section of

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FreezeExceptionProcess

> At the present time, I'd be really pleased if I could work with
> somebody
> that would manage the package into Ubuntu, as the work that we are
> doing
> is quite huge already in Debian alone (note that my employee also
> manages a RPM version for CentOS).

If you can find someone who is interested in the package and wants
to contribute to the package then they can get involved.

After hardy is released there will be a period where many packages
from Debian are "synced" automatically. However this won't currently
happen to dtc (but it will for dtc-xen), as Ubuntu has a slightly
modified package.

How would you feel about including the following change in to
the Debian version of the package?

http://patches.ubuntu.com/d/dtc/dtc_0.25.3-2ubuntu1.patch

If you were to do that then the package could be manually synced,
and then synced automatically from then on.

The only disadvantage to the above change is a possible impact on
backporters.

Thanks,

James