On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 6:12 PM, Matthias Klose
<doko@debian.org> wrote:
On 02.05.2012 18:07, Patrick Baggett wrote:
> Matthias,
>
> I wouldn't mind helping a bit, as I'd like to see GCC 4.7 be the default on
> ia64. I'm good at C/C++ programming and can definitely provide upstream
> patches, but I have absolutely no idea what the "debian way" of doing
> things is -- right now, I'm an end-user. What can I do?
hi Patrick,
please have a look at the ia64 specific bug reports for the gcc-4.6 and gcc-4.7
sources. Then try to reproduce these using the available compiler versions (4.4,
to 4.7 and trunk/gcc-snapshot). Get the preprocessed source, try to to produce
a smaller test case, which can be forwarded upstream, try to find out if it's a
regression compared to earlier gcc releases.
OK, I don't mind checking them out, but like I said before I have no idea where the ia64-specific bug reports are ("no idea what the debian way is", see above). I read this email that you marked as [1], and I still don't know where these bug reports are. I think you're assuming a lot more knowledge about Debian infrastructure that I have. I'm an end-user. I downloaded a CD, installed the OS, and do "apt-get update/upgrade". Any other Debian-specific knowledge -- I don't have it. Give me links, I'll familiarize myself and stop wasting everyone's time. I'm a competent developer and I've submitted plenty of patches, I just don't have experience working with OS distributions.
At this point, I don't even know what the scope of the responsibilities of a "maintainer" is -- do I build all the packages or are there build servers? Do I maintain the modified source if upstream doesn't patch quickly enough or is there a central repository/server? Do I submit binary *.deb files or does someone else? Who would be guiding my efforts (if any) to make sure they align with the "debian way"?
Patrick