Hi! I'm not sure if you follow "distributions" mailing list, so I'm forwarding here. Interesting parts are Debian patch-tracker (already mentioned by Henne) and Patch tagging (vuntz created a concept in the past, but wasn't accepted outside GNOME community, we can discuss the Debian proposal as it will be probably accepted in Ubuntu and Fedora too ...) -------- Original Message -------- Subject: minutes of the mini distro summit held at GSoC meeting Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 23:16:21 +0100 From: Stefano Zacchiroli To: distributions@lists.freedesktop.org Hi all, I've participated at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit the last week, together with various folks from different distro. Thanks to an initiative by Donnie Berkholz (Gentoo), we had there a mini distribution summit, where several distributions were represented. I'm reporting below the minutes of the meeting kindly taken by Sylvestre Ledru (Debian). A couple of additional _personal_ notes of mine, that I believe might interest the public of this list, are as follows: - at the beginning of the session it was reminded about this list, encouraging all people there to use it more, especially to ask advices on how "something" is done in other distro and also how to better coordinate with specific upstream - the page http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/DistributionLocations on our wiki has been updated by most of us. For what concerns Debian, I've updated it with an important pointer to the now official website http://patch-tracker.debian.org , which let everybody knows which changes wrt upstream has been performed in a given Debian package - I've mentioned DEP3 (http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/), an initiative close to be formally accepted in Debian to tag patches with various metadata (e.g. where it comes from, but also whether it has been pushed upstream or not). That format is going to be accepted in Ubuntu too; during the mini summit, people from Fedora expressed interest in adopting it as well. I personally believe it can be a sound basis to uniform patch tagging across distributions. That's all, minutes follow (copy/paste from a printable mediawiki page, still readable, I hope :)). ----------------------------------------------------- Linux distribution mini-summit

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* 1 Distributions present * 2 Minutes o 2.1 Cross-distro discussions o 2.2 Patch management o 2.3 Relationship with upstream o 2.4 Abstraction on package names o 2.5 Compatibility on the startup script o 2.6 How to handle packages on a daily basis [edit] Distributions present * Debian - 6 Debian contributors * Gentoo - 2 Gentoo contributors * Fedora - 2 Fedora contributors * Chaos - 1 contributor [edit] Minutes [edit] Cross-distro discussions Reminder for everybody, we do have a list!: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions . It is the appropriate place to discuss cross-distro topics (packaging, design, issues with specific upstream, ...) [edit] Patch management Discussion around the patch systems. How collaborate with other distributions and exchange patches to avoid duplicate work. Most distributions list their patch-tracking systems on the freedesktop wiki DistributionLocations page. Example of Debian: http://patch-tracker.debian.org Discussion on Debian / Ubuntu relationship. How these two distributions handle packages and patches exchanges. [edit] Relationship with upstream Success on building relationships with upstream Having the main developer subscribed on the distribution bugtracker. Example of a Scilab core developer who has to go from time to time on all bugtrackers / patch management systems to see patches which could be merged upstream [edit] Abstraction on package names Dirk: Example with CRAN (R packaging system). Each R package contains a description file. This file describes the binary dependencies. Example: postgresql will match libpq5 under Debian How to handle relations with distributions of this. How to generalize this [edit] Compatibility on the startup script Discussion on the services / init.d management / invoke-rc.d Example: Differences with Apache under Fedora / Debian Cross-distribution package mapping through a database ? Package map by Sebastien Pipping: http://git.goodpoint.de/?p=packagemap.git;a=summary [edit] How to handle packages on a daily basis How Fedora handles packages. SVN for spec files + patches and upstream tarballs stored in different places. Using git for packaging. Example of Debian Some packaging projects (x.org for example) use the same git repositories as upstream How to track patches and, more generally, how to associate common metadata with them. Example of Debian: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/ Donnie points out "git note" which enables adding information related to a file. Proposal to continue this on the FOSDEM -- Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7 zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/ Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime