Re: notable Debian contributions in 2006

["Tshepang Lekhonkhobe" <tshepang@gmail.com>]

On 3/24/07, Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 24, 2007 at 02:08:10PM +0200, Tshepang Lekhonkhobe wrote:
> > Distors are often viewed as mere packagers, but they tend to drive
> > upstream development in variety of ways. Here's just a few of Debian's
> > contributions to the world of FLOSS during 2006:
> >
> > * creation of cdrkit, a fork of cdrtools, due to a change of licence
> > which happened to be DFSG-incompatible
> > * rebranding of Firefox to Iceweasel due to trademark issues
> > * rebranding of Seamonkey to Iceape due to trademark issues
> > * rebranding of Thunderbird to Icedove due to trademark issues
> >
> > There must be so much more, in which case I hope you may add to this
> > list, and if there's enough contributions, maybe a wiki page could be
> > set up and advertised.
>
> You have your priorities wrong. A fork and three rebrandings are more like
> nuisances compared to for example the bug reports that Debian maintainers
> forwarded to upstream, without or with fixes. Sure, maybe those aren't
> PR-friendly, but they count, and they are the heart of our contribution IMO.

I'm pretty aware that there's plenty of these reports and patches. But
the point of the mail is 'notable' stuff, EG. the contributions to
GTKFB by the d-i team for the graphical-installer (who is actually
mentioned in the README file of that backend in GTK+2.10 release).
This is the kind of example I was hoping this mail would trigger.
Please note that 'notable' doesn't necessarily mean more important. A
major refactoring is more likely to be more notable than a year-long
patch submission exercise, for example.

NB: The GTKFB example inspired this mail