Re: major fixes to backport.

[Mart Raudsepp <leio gentoo org>]

On Sat, 2007-02-24 at 23:49 +0100, Andre Klapper wrote:
> WHAT.
> sending a list of "really major(TM)" issues that have been fixed in
> stable (2.16.x) in the last months.
> i plan to do this more often in the future (more or less combined with
> some showstopper review activities).

Awesome and very appreciated!

> WHY.
> currently it's very problematic to find out if upstream patches have
> really fixed an issue, because GNOME will still be flooded by downstream
> bug reports for that particular problem. we need better information flow
> between upstream and downstream.

True, plus it might give some more time to packagers to fix outstanding
issues or stay on top of things better thanks to the possibly extra time
leading to less bug reports from distro users overall.
Of course the same kind of sharing could be done by distro packagers as
well.

> LIST.
> okay, distros that have a backport policy most likely want to make sure
> that they provide updated packages including these fixes:

For those who prefer to follow upstream releases, could these lists
possibly contain the (stable) version number where this is fixed?
So that it would be easy to check if patching is necessary or a version
already in the distribution covers it or a simple version bump will
suffice.

> FUTURE.
> i kindly ask backport-policy vendors/distros to add a short comment to
> the bugzilla.gnome.org report if/when a patch has been backported
> (HIGHLY appreciated), so it becomes easier to track whether a patch has
> fixed an issue or not. would be also great if this could be done for
> this email here, but i know that my list is looong...
> we cannot always "wait for the next major release", this is way too much
> workload for the bugsquad, and you also will not get content users by
> just sitting out the instability problems...
> 
> so, is this approach welcome, or do i waste my time by duplicating
> efforts (means: do any backport-policy vendors already have some kind of
> tracker systems to identify and backport serious patches)?
> 
> comments, improvements?

-- 
Mart Raudsepp
Gentoo Developer
Mail: leio gentoo org
Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio