Miriam Ruiz wrote:
2008/11/17 Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede@hhs.nl>: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).Some of my upstreams do not care a bit about non-Windows users and are not receptive to changes affecting only the Linux world. Some other upstreams consider their games are finished, have moved forward and even though they answer questions about them and help you maintaining them, they probably won't make new releases. Some other upstreams are non-active and even missing. The fact it that, at least in the games I maintain, I probably have to make far more patches than in the average free software programs.
I hear you loud and clear, we have the same problem.
I really guess Fedora must do the same for a lot of games too.
We do.
I don't think that having a common repository of these patches common to all the distros, even if they are copied and adapted again in each of our repositories, would be a bad idea at all,
Well, for that to be usefull, it would have to contain a golden set of patches, currently different distro's will be fixing the same issues in different manners, some may be fixing lots of issues in one big patch, others may have more granular patches. For such a patches repository to be really usefull, someone would need to take all those patches, get the best fixes for all issues, and where necessary come up with more generic fixes. When all that is already done, how much work is left to make a new release ?
Besides that such a repo would need distro maintainers to actively by pushing new patches in there and pulling patches from others.
I have a different idea, why not make a website which allows searching of all the VCS's various distros use to store the various patches, so I could type foo, and it would show me that distros 1, 2 and 4 have a package which name matches foo, and then links to view each distro's patches.
Then on top of that you could have the possibility to register with that website and then to subscribe to automatic announcements of changes in package foo of distro 2.
Then we take away the having to push part, and we make pulling much easier as you get announcements when there might be something worthy of pulling.
I think this would make for a nice summer of code project ? Regards, Hans