Re: [Evolution-hackers] Maintenance fork for Evolution / EDS 2.32

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2 infradead org>]

On Mon, 2011-04-04 at 08:53 +0200, Milan Crha wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-04-01 at 20:07 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > That's great; thanks. I'll do a little more testing on the patches
> > I've cherry-picked into my trees, and then unless someone else has
> > objected in the meantime I'll push them. 
> 
> 	Hi,
> I objected against this many times, directly to you, on IRC, with no
> effect, obviously. If I recall correctly, the reason why release-team
> decreased releases is that distributions were *not* using .2 release.
> Which is just the opposite you are trying to convince us. If they are
> not using official releases, why should they use unofficial branch?

Fedora does. As Yves-Alexis said, Debian (and thus Ubuntu?) does.
And MeeGo does.

Even before we start looking at other distributions, that is *enough*
duplication of effort that it seems worthwhile to collaborate on a
single code base rather than each having their own 'fork' and
backporting fixes from HEAD for themselves.

> By the way, how would you look for a fix user reported to your
> distribution, as a distribution maintainer? 
> ...
> Note that I do not expect anyone looking into git branch for a
> particular fix, ...

That's all very true, for a *specific* fix for a bug that a user has
managed to report.

Having said that, if the distro *were* currently running 2.32.1, I'd
hope the 'workflow' you outline would *also* include checking in the
gnome-2-32 branch to see if the fix has *already* been backported and
tested there?

By collecting the backported patches into a central tree, we don't break
the workflow you describe — it stills works just as before, with an
extra 'shortcut' to a fully-backported-and-tested patch in some cases.

But I'm not thinking *just* about specific fixes for bugs that get
reported. Part of the benefit of a central tree is that if a bug gets
reported in *one* distribution and fixed there, the backported fix can
benefit users of *all* distributions.

Take the issue with ordering of modified recurrences, for example. How
many users would manage to actually track that down and make a coherent
bug report, and how many would just be inconvenienced by the fact that
changes sometimes don't show up right in Evolution, and put it down to
gremlins? I feel sure that the reason that bug went unreported for so
long was *not* because nobody actually *saw* it.

By putting that fix into a 2.32.3 release, we potentially get that fix
out to a large number of users of distributions who are stil on 2.32
(which includes Fedora, for the next 8 months or so).

I appreciate that you think I'm wasting my time. Perhaps I am; time will
tell. But my time is my own to waste. My main concern is to ensure that
I'm not wasting *your* time. And since you can choose to completely
ignore what we're doing in the gnome-2-32 branch, I think we're safe on
that front.

-- 
dwmw2