Re: Better collaboration with distributions

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Fred:

> The 5 questions that were asked are the followings:
> 1. What version(s) of GNOME do you maintain in a stable fashion?

GNOME 2.6 and 2.30.

> 2. How much work does this represent?

A considerable amount of work providing support for supported versions
and also keeping up with the latest development release.  Since GNOME 
2.30 and 3.x are not planned to be parallel installable, this will
likely complicate ongoing work.

> 3. Do you feel there is duplication of work between what you do and what
> other distribution do?

Sure.  I think all distros find the same bugs and work to fix them.
Sometimes we notice upstream patches in bugzilla, but there has not
seemed to be much effort in the past to discuss or highlight these
issues.  Perhaps a better use of distributor-list might be to
coordinate these activities.  A bug tool that allowed distros to
cross-reference or aggregate bugs would be very useful.

> 4. How do you see a potential collaboration between all of "us"
> (upstream and downstream projects)?

Many distros will likely need to provide ongoing support for the latest
GNOME 2.x release.  It seems there should be a lot of opportunity for
collaboration.

> 5. We are definitely aware that today each of us use a different bug
> tracking system. Do you see any possible technical solution that could
> address this specific issue?

It seems that LaunchPad bugs track bugs in other bugzilla systems.
Note how this bug tracks freedesktop.org bugzilla #10617.

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/xorg-server/+bug/241145

Being able to set up a bug database where bugs across distros could
be tracked would be really useful, I'd think, and make it much easier
for distros to collaborate.

Brian