Richard Hartmann wrote:
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 22:40, Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com> wrote:When I noticed the talk about sfxr here on the list I immediately hot off my ass and started packaging it for Fedora.You re-reminded me of the fact that we used to speculate about a larger game group. Is there any objection against /me trying to get such a list set up & started? I assume it will grow quite quickly, simply due to word of mouth.
I think a cross-distro games mailinglist would be a good idea!
The even more radical idea which just crossed my mind: How about maintaining the Fedora (and other distributions) packages in the Debian repo?
I'm afraid that is not possible, Fedora has one centralized CVS and all packaging related files (build instructions (spec-files), patches, .desktop files, etc.) all go there. Fedora's build infrastructure does not support pulling data to build packages from any other source, changing this will be very hard (because of security, inertia, etc.).
Specific patches could be kept in distro-specific branches on top of the generic 'downstream' branch.
I think the real solution here is to get each and every patch upstreamed, as I've done with sfxr, and as is the Fedora way / mantra. In Fedora we try to make sure others do not need to reinvent the wheel by always pushing patches upstream, we even have a rule were each patch in a specfile needs to have a comment above it with an upstream bugtracker URL where the patch is submitted (or an explanation why this is Fedora specific).
The problem with this is there are some cases where there no longer is an upstream, I would much rather see us spending time here, then in trying to get some sort of cross distro svn / CVS / git, as I never see that taking of, and just thinking about it gives me nightmares about the ensuing flamewars.
What do you guys say? Am I making sense or would you prefer for me to simply shut up about this heresy?
I wouldn't call it heresy, but I never see this happen. What would be good is to spend time on resurrecting some upstreams, so either take over their existing infra (for example sf.net allows you to file take over requests) or put up something new on some FOSS hosting site somewhere, nothing fancy really just an CVS / SVN, a place to put tarbals and a short webpage explaining that this is not really a restart, that people should not expect new features, but this is a new central place for distros packaging foo to send patches too.
Regards, Hans