Miriam Ruiz wrote:
2008/11/17 Hans de Goede <j.w.r.degoede@hhs.nl>: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.It makes sense, as long as all the involved distros make that information and the set of patches theyr'e using easily available on the net.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 like the idea. We should define a lot of things to make it possible, but it makes a lot of sense.
I think you're thinking too much Debian-ess here, Debian (AFAIK) has a rather weird setup with different groups using different VCS's, quite a few other distro's have a pretty cleans setup with one VCS neatly and orderly containing all patches and other packaging files, see for example:
http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/devel/xawtv http://cvs.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/SPECS/SDL/ http://svn.rpmforge.net/svn/trunk/rpms/allegro/ So those are easy to "harvest", some make it somewhat harder, for example: http://cvs.pld-linux.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/SPECS/ Contains all spec files for pld-linux, then one needs to go to: http://cvs.pld-linux.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/SOURCES/ To find the actual patches referenced from those spec files.Others are even harder, for some reason opensuse seems to disappoint me about its openness each time, I couldn't find anything resembling a VCS on their site, I also love their how to contribute page: "The most obvious way, for programmers, to participate in the development of openSUSE is to post a patch as a suggested solution to an existing bug in Bugzilla. Each package has a maintainer, who will contact you to discuss your proposed solution. You may want to join one of our development mailing lists before you start coding in order to discuss your plans and coordinate with other developers."
So it looks like there is no way to get opensuse patches other then unpacking the SRPMS they provide.
Maybe we should try to contact other distros in this early stage to see if they want to become involved in its design?
Yes, I think that would be a good idea, go ahead. I wouldn't count on us succeeding in defining one way to get to the actual per distro patches though, I think we need to have a modular collection engine, which has per distro plugins.
Regards, Hans