Re: Debian 9 t: Update Gstreamer Base plugins package to resolve a Gstreamer bug

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org>]

On Fri, 04 May 2018, Dinesh Iyer wrote:
> "You'll have to talk to whoever is providing you your older version of
> GStreamer. They will have to backport the fix to that old version, but it
> should just cleanly apply to the older versions."
> 
> The patch that needs to be applied is:
> https://github.com/GStreamer/gst-plugins-base/commit/9f9000e693694ea33c21607140ffc29aa1734062#diff-acf6f1abae3d918458c7a91ce8a0b3ad
> 
> Is this something that would be possible to do? This would really help me
> as this stall is a show stopper for my application.

Talking in the general way, yes, it is possible.  I am not one of the
DDs responsible for gstream, though.  So all I can tell you is how it
would go for one of the packages I am responsible for:

Since a stable update is needed, one has to go the long way to get the
Debian stable release manager to approve it (it doesn't depend only on
the DD responsible for the package).

First, you get the fix into unstable (either through a patch, or by
ensuring an already fixed version is present).  And wait for it to
migrate to testing (usually, five-seven days).

Then, you need to also test the fix throughoutly, as applied to the
Debian stable codebase:  you'd get the current source packages for
gstreamer in Debian stable, apply the required patches, and do a lot of
testing to ensure it caused no regressions _and_ fixed the issue
properly.

Then you file a bug, severity important or above, with a full
description of the issue, how to recreate it, why it is really important
to have it fixed.

You also describe in that bug report all the testing the change has seen
(how much time since it is upstream, how much time it has been on Debian
unstable and testing, etc).  You describe all the testing you did on the
modified Debian stable package with the fix.  You describe the results
of this testing.

This bug report is *IMPORTANT*, and yes, it is a lot of work.  But don't
shortcut it: how well you do this is directly related to the chances of
the stable update being approved by the release manager.  I know that
from experience (it is no easier for a DD to get a stable update
approved, we need to do all that work as well).

Please title the bug report with "stable update request: <reason>" or
something like that.  The maintainer can then provide extra info to the
bug report, retitle and reassign it to the stable release team as
required per Debian procedures.

-- 
  Henrique Holschuh