Fedora Insight weekly Meeting

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 09:05:16AM +0545, Drak wrote:
>    2010/5/22 Toshio Kuratomi <[1]a.badger at gmail.com>
> 
>      On Sat, May 22, 2010 at 02:03:06AM +0545, Drak wrote:
>      > I was asking how do we let Fedora know if we have applied a vendor
>      patch to our
>      > distro that has not yet been released by the vendor in an official
>      version but
>      > will be part of their next release (some when).  Is there an official
>      way to
>      > let you know what the patches are?  Possibly just a notice in our
>      readme
>      > sighting vendor versions and or revision numbers from their VCS?
>      >
>      I'm not sure what all your referencing:
>      * Who is we?
>      * What is our distro?
>      * Who is the vendor?
>      * Who is the you that you're letting know?
> 
>    Ok plain English time :-P
>    When we Zikula need to add a vendor patch for a vendor library we
>    distribute with Zikula, we Zikula need to let you know what the vendor
>    patch is so your packagers know what to patch.  How do we let you know
>    what the correct patch is officially.  Vendor patch means a patch
>    committed to their VCS but not yet released in an official version.
>    e.g. Zikula uses Smarty.  Smarty fixes something important to us, but
>    hasnt yet released a version that includes that fix.  So we checkout
>    revision X from their source control or file y from revision X and patch
>    the version of Smarty we distribute.  How do we let you know if we have in
>    fact needed to do this.
>    This particular example is fictitious but the way, but could very well
>    happen.
>    Drak

OK, thanks for that clarification Drak.

Recall that Fedora doesn't use bundled libraries, in part so that we
can scale software maintenance across a wider group of participants.
In this case, you'd likely want to notify the maintaners of both
Zikula and the Smarty library to notify them of the situation and the
specific patch needed.

At that time, my understanding is the Smarty maintainer would want to
check the Smarty upstream for intention to release the patch.  (You
could provide references if desired to make this process faster.)
That way we're only using patches that have buy-in from upstream --
which seems likely in the case you describe.

How often would you estimate this happens for Zikula?

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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