DEX ancient-patches: where the rubber meets the road

[Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org>]

http://dex.alioth.debian.org/ubuntu/ancient-patches/status/

At this point, all of the straightforward work is done.  Obsolete and merged
patches have been filtered out, and those which remain have open bugs in the
BTS.

Here's the status of the four remaining bugs:

* http://people.ubuntu.com/patches/sysklogd.no-root.diff
  Debian bug: http://bugs.debian.org/35325
  Thread: http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2011/03/msg00037.html

  I emailed Martin Schulze about a week ago, and received a prompt but brief
  reply that he would look in the next few days.  I've followed up to check
  on it today.

* http://people.ubuntu.com/patches/dhcp3.client-send-hostname.patch
  Debian bug: http://bugs.debian.org/151820

  The bug report indicates that this is fixed in a newer upstream release,
  which came out in July (8 months ago) but is not yet packaged in Debian.

  Would someone be willing to help package the new upstream release to get
  this closed out?

* http://people.ubuntu.com/patches/dhcp3.deroot-server.diff
  Debian bug: http://bugs.debian.org/308832
  Thread: http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2011/03/msg00039.html
  
  I emailed the maintainer team about a week ago, and received a response
  from Andrew Pollock, who says:

  - He does not want to merge this patch into the Debian package because he
    wants it to be as close to upstream as possible

  - He does not have enough time to work on Debian/dhcp issues right now

  - He hopes to meet with upstream maintainers in the near future, and
    discuss this patch with them to try to get it merged

* http://people.ubuntu.com/patches/sysvinit-quietinit.patch
  Debian bug: http://bugs.debian.org/326677
  Thread: http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2011/03/msg00052.html

  I think this patch is unnecessary in Debian, but it was filed in the BTS
  by someone else (Petter Reinholdtsen), so I was hesitant to close it
  myself.  Instead, I emailed Petter about a week ago and asked whether he
  wanted to merge the patch or discard it.  I haven't heard back from him
  yet.

  I think this patch is obsolete from a DEX perspective anyway, because the
  patch is no longer in Ubuntu.  Does anyone feel there is value in
  continuing to track it, or should we forget about it?

The end result is that these four outstanding issues are currently stalled.

This is exactly the problem that DEX was created to understand and solve.
These last four items will teach us the most about how to improve teamwork
with derivatives.

I would appreciate your thoughts on how best to proceed with getting them
resolved.

-- 
 - mdz