[2013-02-20 00:15:40 +1000] Allan McRae:
One thing I would like to talk about is our interaction with upstream. I know a few of us have commit access to various upstream projects, or have regularly contributed patches, or have upstream bug tracker privileges etc. Could people let me know about these things so I can make a summary.
I've sent quite a few patches upstream; probably half of them are of the type "porting foo to libbar-2's API" - we aren't on the bleeding edge for nothing. I haven't done a lot besides that, and try more and more to get users to interact with upstream themselves. In fact, I see KISS packaging as a way of cutting the middle man (me): make packages so straightforward and minimalistic that all user complaints can be forwarded as-is upstream. A package for which this has been taken to the next level is audacious: upstream follows our bug tracker and, usually, by the time I get assigned a new bug report, they have already worked out what the problem is (sometimes with the help of the reporter) and released a new version fixing it. So I'm just closing bug reports and packaging new versions... I'm sure that also applies to tons of other packages in our repos.
Something else I was specifically asked to cover is future plans for Arch. Does anyone have things beyond updating packages they want to do?
Only what I've mentioned on the mailing list in the past - but unfortunately haven't had enough time to bring further since: - merge with Arch ARM. - build packages in VM (works like a charm for i686/x86_64, that's how I've been building stuff [instead of chroots] for the past many months, but I haven't gotten around adapting it to allow ARM VMs yet). Cheers and enjoy the trip/conference! -- Gaetan