Re: [gentoo-dev] [bugzilla-daemon@gentoo.org: [Bug 322157] [mail-filter/procmail] new ebuild + autocreate maildirs]

[Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote:
> * Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek@gentoo.org> schrieb:
>> I don't see how these various distros can be made to agree with
>> each other and I certainly can't see them using a common tarball
>> source.
>
> Thats not even necessary. They just should use the infrastructure,
> as described in my paper. So everyone can easily set up automatic
> notifications, cherry-pick, etc, etc.
>

Why should we? I am *yet* to see a single reason for us to change how
we work other than "please use this since I've been putting a lot of
effort into it".

>> On a technical level, it's got serious security, trust, and
>> redundancy problems.
>
> Git makes that very easy ;-p
>

No, it does not. The security problems come because you are the single
point of failure. The trust problems come because we have no reason to
trust you. The redundancy problems come because if your hosting goes
down or you lose interest, we're left high and dry. Git has nothing to
do with any of this.

>> It is extremely important that distros collaborate in some form
>> when it comes to patches that *can* be shared,
>
> If we're doing a good job (my generic fixes instead of distro-
> specfic dirty hacks) about 99% can be shared ;-p
>

I'd advise you to take a look at the sort of patching Ubuntu/Debian
does, and then revisit that figure. You'll find it more along the
lines of 30%.


>> A practical solution to the problem of patch sharing is to
>> have a website with a search interface for upstream source
>> tarballs, which can display all the patches that various
>> distros apply, as well as a download link for the patchsets
>> (hotlinked to the distro files where possible).
>
> Too complicated, and actually would not help me a single bit.

Help *you*? I thought this was about helping the distros. If your
proposal is not about making our work easier, please don't waste our
time.

>> Distro packagers are much more comfortable with downloading
>> patchsets from a foreign source than complete tarballs.
>
> man git-format-patch ;-p
>

So why don't you submit that to bugzilla?

>> I know you have spent a lot of time on this already, but please
>> understand it from where we stand. We're short on manpower, and
>> there's no real benefits of shifting our tarball source; OTOH there
>> are major disadvantages too unless we pitch in with manpower
>> ourselves. And honestly speaking, that manpower is better spent making
>> stuff work locally.
>
> Well, Gentoo is short of manpower ? hmm, perhaps some should think
> about why so many folks are resigning and so few fresh coming in
> (at least according to this lists traffic) ;-O
>

I'm beginning to think that you're not taking my honest advice very seriously.

>> Please consider the "patch-website" idea above. We definitely need
>> someone to code it up, gather the source-package to distro patches
>> mappings, and advertise it.
>
> Actually, I once had somehing in that area, called "comprehensive
> source database", but unfurtinately it got lost in an disk array
> crash a few years ago, and I didnt find the time to rewrite it yet.
>
> Meanwhile I dont need it anymore, since I gave up maintaining
> plaintext patches in favour of git. And that makes my daily works
> _much_ easier.
>

You don't need to maintain **anything** manually if you code the
website properly. That's the whole point. You get major benefits with
minimal long-term work which can be done by a single person in their
free time.

This job is easily automated to simply aggregate links to patches
which all the distros manually publish themselves. For Gentoo, it's
the ebuilds; for Debian/Ubuntu, they actually publish the diffs[1];
Fedora keeps its patches in a common CVS repo[2], etc etc. Once the
website is up and running, maintenance is minimal, and can be done by
a single person looking at it in their free time.

1. See packages.(debian|ubuntu).(org|com)
2. cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/

-- 
~Nirbheek Chauhan

Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team