On 16/04/15 19:03, Didier 'OdyX' Raboud wrote:
Hi Philip,
Le jeudi, 9 avril 2015, 21.07:13 Philip Pemberton a écrit :
I've been working on a number of fixes to ptouch-driver, which are
currently hosted in a Mercurial repository on Bitbucket:
https://bitbucket.org/philpem/printer-driver-ptouch/commits
Great, thanks for that!
You're welcome :)
I suspect I need to submit patches; is there a preferred format for
these?
Debian and Ubuntu are not the upstream maintainers of ptouch-driver, and
although we're maintaining a small pile of patches (two, as of Debian
Jessie), we should put ourselves in the de-facto position of being the
new upstream maintainers: the suite in debian/patches is not a
substitute to proper upstream releases.
That said, there are two(-and-a-half) ways forward:
- either the actual upstream maintainers accept these patches and
release new versions, which we can then deploy through our
distributions;
- if that doesn't happen, then there are two possible alternatives:
- the upstream author is missing-in-action or unresponsive: in that
case, you (or anyone else interested) could probably take over name,
repositories, versions, etc.
- the upstream author refuses to integrate your patches (for whatever
reason), in which case you can also resort to forking, in which case
you should pick a new name.
In both cases, you'd then push your code (without the debian/
directory) to a public repository and start releasing new versions;
which we can then deploy through our distributions.
I found a working email address for the original maintainer, and
contacted him regarding that. Here's my message and his response:
Hello,
Are you still maintaining the P-touch printer driver located at
http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/panic/P-touch/ ?
I ask because I've fixed a number of bugs (my patches are on
https://bitbucket.org/philpem/printer-driver-ptouch/commits ) in the
Ubuntu and Debian packaged versions, and would like to try and get my
fixes merged into a future release of the driver.
No, unfortunately I don’t have the time. It would be nice to see it maintained, though, so anyone interested in doing so is very welcome. Your patches would probably be a good start.
Best Regards
Arne
______________________
Arne.Glenstrup@gmail.com
So it appears "fork and fix" is the way to go with this.
Suggestions for an alternate name would be gratefully received, though
at this point I can't think of anything else which needs fixing to make
the driver usable. The only improvements I can think of involve adding
support for more printers... and I'd need those printers to test with.
Not really a priority when some of them cost upwards of £200 each.
Though I do need to poke the gLabels developers to try and get the
Brother label templates fixed...
Perhaps people will find more bugs in it? Hmm... :)
I also noticed there was a Git repository on Alioth for this package;
would some form of Git export be preferred to patches?
See above: ensuring proper upstream releases that include your patches
is way preferable to a quilt suite in debian/patches.
Looking forward to new upstream releases!
Thanks,