Re: meeting poll closes in ~ 20 hours, thoughts on the agenda
On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 6:40 AM, Jeremiah C. Foster wrote:
> I'd like to discuss the diff or the delta between Debian and an arbitrary Derivative. What are we derivatives patching? Are there patches that should get back into Debian? (I'd bet there are because some of the derivatives are quite high-quality and have the freedom to do interesting things that you can't do with a large project like Debian.)
>
> How do we bring patches back into Debian? I'd like to do this with Maemo - identify patches via some kind of automated data mining and then push back the relevant patches to Debian. Has anyone else embarked on a project like this?
I have been working on this topic and now have a script working pretty
well. There are a few more bugs I need to fix before I can make it
live and then I will ask for feedback here and on debian-devel.
My script looks at each source package and checks if it (or parts of
it) was ever in Debian. If it looks modified then it attempts to find
which Debian source package it was probably based on and diffs against
that (using the snapshot.d.o database and files). Then it checks the
patch to see if it is useful (currently ignores changelog-only
patches) and outputs a list of useful patches, links to modified
source packages and links to new source packages. It currently
generates 80GB of patches. Most of that is because of how Ubuntu does
kde-l10n-* differently to Debian and also because of the way the
script finds versions to diff from (thunderbird packaging for one
distro was forked from firefox for Debian or something). I'll try to
have the script ready by the meeting and the results copied to alioth
so that after the meeting folks can take a look at the results and
give some feedback before I send a mail to debian-devel.
For the script to work on Maemo you need to add a sources.list with
some deb-src lines here:
http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/Maemo
The sources.list should preferably contain all supported releases.
In terms of auditing and forwarding patches back to Debian there are
two DEX projects, one finished:
http://dex.alioth.debian.org/ubuntu/ancient-patches/ (finished)
http://lists.debian.org/debian-derivatives/2011/06/msg00039.html (big
merges, stalled)
--
bye,
pabs
http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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