Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: proxy-dev (an alternative to sunrise?)

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de>]

* Luis Francisco Araujo <araujo@gentoo.org> schrieb:

Hi,

> Well, my idea is more focused on getting closer the developer with the
> user, in the sense that they would be like a team (as i already said) ,
> where the developer is the official figure in the group. So, at some

so far okay, but we probably suffer an different problem: 

The gentoo devs currently do much of the upstream's work.
Fixing bugs or even adding new stuff which does not directly have to
do w/ gentoo should be done exlusively by the upstream.

The problem is: many projects have quite long release cycles and don't
do separate bugfix releases. For example expat: it took very long to
get some little makefile fixes into the release - the upstream team
collected quite much until they did the next release (and then they
released an direct, just bugfixing, sucessor of 1.98.x as 2.0.x ...).
Some projects are quite strange about such things and its like fighting
against windmills trying to change their minds.

So I founded an project which maintains such bugfixes and releases
hotfix patches against many versions of many patches and also stays
in contact w/ upstream to get them in the tree:

    http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce 

This project is meant to concentrate QM efforts more generally (instead 
of each distro for its own) and prevent double works, so many distros 
(and also self-compiling people) can benefit from it.

I'd like to invite you all to join this project and use it for your
dev works @ gentoo.

For an oss-qm + gentoo connection I imagine the following workflow:
(should also work w/ other distros this way) 

* gentoo user files an bug -> gets assigned to the devs.
* dev inspects the bug whether its gentoo-specific or general
  @ general:
     * dev pushes the bug to oss-qm (files a bug there), 
     * oss-qm tries to solve this bug and releases a new hotfix
     * the gentoo dev then takes in the hotfix and gives the 
       patched package into the QM cycle.
       
  @ gentoo:
     * works as currently

As for the suggested user contribution:

The users willing to contribute simply join the oss-qm team and do
their works there. This at least would cope evrything that's not
gentoo specific. What remains to gentoo would be just the contents
of the ebuild file (ie. useflags and dependencies okay, etc).

At the moment some ebuilds contain much logic for doing the actual 
build, ie. generating makefiles, etc. This should go completely to
oss-qm - the (hotfixed) packages should all supply one of the semi-
standard interfaces like autoconf-style ./configure, package imports
should be done entirely via pkg-config, etc.


In the last few days I did much of such fixing works, ie. on mpd and 
libao, mainly fixing configure.in + makefiles. Some of those works 
are currently hanging on the devs feet, but shouldn't. The gentoo devs 
should only have to take some (maybe hotfixed) package, pull it through 
the QM cycle and look if its good enough to get it into the tree.


cu
-- 
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 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
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 Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce:
 	http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce
 Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions:
	http://patches.metux.de/
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