[arch-dev-public] Please provide Info for my talk!

[Gaetan Bisson]

[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