Re: Tracking derivatives delta: explanations, history [Was: Sponsoring a Tails hackfest?]
Hi,
I just wanted to chime in to introduce some of my own (mid-term) plans
related to that, both my Debian and my Kali hats.
First off, as you might know distro-tracker (the thing behind
tracker.debian.org) is now usable by derivatives and as such Kali started
using it on pkg.kali.org.
I plan to develop a new distro-tracker extension specifically tailored for
derivatives that want to use it track/manage their divergence with Debian.
I'll start with simple version comparison so that derivatives know what
they have forked, which packages are outdated, which are newer, and which
have unmerged changes. This would be a good place to document the
package-level divergence (i.e. why is this not in debian).
But later on it would be nice to include some patch generation logic
and possibly to extract DEP-3 information from new patches, etc.
All this data could be made available so that tracker.debian.org
can link back where appropriate.
On Sat, 19 Jul 2014, intrigeri wrote:
> > Should be easy to add rrdtool graphs or the like. If we want something
> > more advanced than that, a database would probably be required.
>
> IMO rrdtool graphs should be good enough.
Note that the database constraint is not a big one in the case of
distro-tracker, we already have the database.
>
> >> 1. Have explanations about the delta in each case
>
> > That information should be in debian/changelog, which would be in the delta.
>
> I could agree on this principle, but in practice, I doubt derivative
> developers explain in debian/changelog what part of their delta should
> be ignored ("legit" delta) and what should be improved. DEP-3's
> "Forwarded" field, when applicable, seems more adequate. Also,
> debian/changelog is not machine-readable, is meant to document
> incremental changes, and does not provide an aggregated view of the
> current state of things.
FWIW current best practice from Ubuntu is to make a small summary of the
remaining delta after a merge in the changelog:
http://patches.ubuntu.com/d/dpkg/dpkg_1.17.10ubuntu1.patch
> > BTW: I plan to have a DebConf14 BoF about the derivatives
> > patch-generation stuff.
>
> Awesome. I'll be there.
I won't but I'll try to make it over IRC.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Discover the Debian Administrator's Handbook:
→ http://debian-handbook.info/get/
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