On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 12:22:53PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote:
> We now have a list of derivatives and some information about them[1].
> A list of derivatives hiding away in a corner of the wiki is in my
> opinion not that useful, there are many of those at various places on
> the web.
>
> I didn't yet emphasise this but the *main* point of the derivatives
> census is to integrate information about Debian derivatives more
> deeply into our infrastructure to facilitate merging ideas, patches,
Full ACK.
> So, this is a brainstorm thread about ways in which we can integrate
> information about derivatives into Debian infrastructure. To start us
> off I've added an idea (Planet Debian Downstream) to the wiki page at
> [2]. If you have any more ideas based on the current content of pages
> at [1] or can see some interesting information that might be missing
> from the census template[3] please mention them here or add them to
> the wiki page at [2].
So, another one which comes to my mind (although I believe it's you
mentioned it to me in the past) is PTS integration like what we are
currently doing with Ubuntu. For maintainers, it would be a dream to
have a sort of dashboard from which they can monitor all the deltas of
their packages classified per derivative distribution. Achieving that
with per-distro importers would be probably a pain, especially
considering that small derivatives generally attract less interest than
more popular derivatives. So, the ideal way to get there, would probably
be (for Debian) to advertise a standard interface supported by the PTS
that would enable integration of per-derivative patch
information.
Ideally, given that small derivatives are also likely to have less
people power than more popular derivatives, we should also try to
provide a software layer that enable to generate the needed information
out of, say, an archive of Debian source packages. That could probably
come as a release of the source code of patch-tracker.d.o, after having
made it independent of Debian (I haven't checked with Sean how much it
is so, but is likely to have Debian-specific assumptions).
Similarly, it would be nice to monitor of all those patches, their
status wrt forward upstream (either Debian or the original upstream
author). That could be done if we will manage to popularize DEP 3 patch
tagging guidelines.
As an intermediate step in between the above and the status quo,
collecting per-package URL schemes pointing to $VCS of a specific
package would be a nice addition as well. The use case of that would be
having something like a "--distro $name" flag for debcheckout, enabling
developers of any derivative to quickly access the current head of work
being done in other derivatives.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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