Debian contemplates patch management [LWN.net]

Debian contemplates patch management

Posted May 20, 2008 19:21 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722)
Parent article: Debian contemplates patch management

I like the idea of having patches attached to bugs. I'd think that most of them come out of
fixing reported issues anyway, so "fixed in Debian but not upstream" could be just a bug
status. Perhaps there should also be a field for a link to the upstream bug report that this
patch fixes, to prompt Debian developers to try to get it resolved at the other end. For
things where the upstream project and Debian differ on how things should be, this upstream bug
could be closed as something the upstream project doesn't want to do, but the pair would exist
as evidence that the Debian maintainer contacted the upstream project about it.

For that matter, this is something I think any good distributed bug tracker should support:
having the same bug in both the distro bug tracker and the upstream project bug tracker, with
different states. (So it could be fixed in the distro but open upstream if the upstream hasn't
deal with it, or it could be fixed upstream but open in the distro if the distro isn't yet
shipping a version where it's fixed.)

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BTS has these features, but we need a separate patch tracker

Posted May 21, 2008 3:01 UTC (Wed) by midg3t (subscriber, #30998) [Link]

For bug reports in the Debian bug tracker that are to do with the upstream code there are the forwarded (for the upstream bug URI) and fixed-upstream tags, as well as state on whether it is fixed in the Debian package (fixed).

The bug tracker should not be used instead of a patch tracker, it should be used with a patch tracker. The bug lists for some packages (like linux-2.6) are already almost impenetrable. While every patch should have a bug entry either upstream or in the Debian bug tracker, nobody wants to have to trawl the list of bugs to find out exactly what patches are being applied. That's what a patch tracker is for.