minutes of the mini distro summit held at GSoC meeting

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

Hi all,
  I've participated at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit the last
week, together with various folks from different distro. Thanks to an
initiative by Donnie Berkholz (Gentoo), we had there a mini distribution
summit, where several distributions were represented. I'm reporting
below the minutes of the meeting kindly taken by Sylvestre Ledru
(Debian).

A couple of additional _personal_ notes of mine, that I believe might
interest the public of this list, are as follows:

- at the beginning of the session it was reminded about this list,
  encouraging all people there to use it more, especially to ask advices
  on how "something" is done in other distro and also how to better
  coordinate with specific upstream

- the page
  http://distributions.freedesktop.org/wiki/DistributionLocations on our
  wiki has been updated by most of us.

  For what concerns Debian, I've updated it with an important pointer to
  the now official website http://patch-tracker.debian.org , which let
  everybody knows which changes wrt upstream has been performed in a
  given Debian package

- I've mentioned DEP3 (http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/), an initiative
  close to be formally accepted in Debian to tag patches with various
  metadata (e.g. where it comes from, but also whether it has been
  pushed upstream or not). That format is going to be accepted in Ubuntu
  too; during the mini summit, people from Fedora expressed interest in
  adopting it as well. I personally believe it can be a sound basis to
  uniform patch tagging across distributions.

That's all, minutes follow (copy/paste from a printable mediawiki page,
still readable, I hope :)).

-----------------------------------------------------

Linux distribution mini-summit
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Contents
[hide]

    * 1 Distributions present
    * 2 Minutes
          o 2.1 Cross-distro discussions
          o 2.2 Patch management
          o 2.3 Relationship with upstream
          o 2.4 Abstraction on package names
          o 2.5 Compatibility on the startup script
          o 2.6 How to handle packages on a daily basis

[edit] Distributions present

    * Debian - 6 Debian contributors
    * Gentoo - 2 Gentoo contributors
    * Fedora - 2 Fedora contributors
    * Chaos - 1 contributor 

[edit] Minutes
[edit] Cross-distro discussions

Reminder for everybody, we do have a list!:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/distributions . It is the
appropriate place to discuss cross-distro topics (packaging, design,
issues with specific upstream, ...)
[edit] Patch management

Discussion around the patch systems.

How collaborate with other distributions and exchange patches to avoid
duplicate work. Most distributions list their patch-tracking systems on
the freedesktop wiki DistributionLocations page. Example of Debian:
http://patch-tracker.debian.org

Discussion on Debian / Ubuntu relationship. How these two distributions
handle packages and patches exchanges.
[edit] Relationship with upstream

Success on building relationships with upstream

Having the main developer subscribed on the distribution bugtracker.

Example of a Scilab core developer who has to go from time to time on
all bugtrackers / patch management systems to see patches which could be
merged upstream
[edit] Abstraction on package names

Dirk: Example with CRAN (R packaging system). Each R package contains a
description file. This file describes the binary dependencies. Example:
postgresql will match libpq5 under Debian

How to handle relations with distributions of this.

How to generalize this
[edit] Compatibility on the startup script

Discussion on the services / init.d management / invoke-rc.d

Example: Differences with Apache under Fedora / Debian

Cross-distribution package mapping through a database ?

Package map by Sebastien Pipping:
http://git.goodpoint.de/?p=packagemap.git;a=summary


[edit] How to handle packages on a daily basis

How Fedora handles packages. SVN for spec files + patches and upstream
tarballs stored in different places.

Using git for packaging. Example of Debian

Some packaging projects (x.org for example) use the same git
repositories as upstream

How to track patches and, more generally, how to associate common
metadata with them. Example of Debian: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/

Donnie points out "git note" which enables adding information related to
a file.

Proposal to continue this on the FOSDEM 

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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