<em>If you were maintainer of a significant upstream package, you'd likely realize that it's
easier said than done.</em>
Because the tools are not in place. That's why I said "try".
I don't expect someone to be able to track all downstreams packages. One developer cannot
track all distributions especially because each distribution track changes in a different way.
But if people work together it should be possible to come up with a set of tools to help all
those upstreams maintainers.
One could then do something like:
list-patches ssh ubuntu 8.04
Most distributions work in the open. This information doesn't change overnight and could be
centralized on a server. Maybe distrowatch or something similar.
The tools would help both ways, as distributors would be able to also look at what other
distributors are doing.
Posted Apr 11, 2008 0:22 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
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I think it's less work for a downstream maintainer to send an email to the upstream maintainer than to maintain the patch in such a way that "pull" works. And looking at the total effort by everyone, I'm sure the email is considerably less work. But probably less reliable.
I sometimes get pointed to lists of downstream patches for packages I maintain. I find it very hard to glean defect information from them. One of the reasons is the open source tradition of not documenting beyond the code itself. It often takes quite a bit of effort to figure out what the point of a patch is. OTOH, when people email me patches, they almost always include a nice explanation.
What about pulling changes from downstream ?
Posted Apr 12, 2008 19:21 UTC (Sat) by boklm (subscriber, #34568)
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It's not a lot of work to send an email, but it's easy to forget.