[Hamara-devel] debian-patch tracker service is down for about a year, but derivatives patch service is on

[shirish]

Hi all,
I had been thinking about the debian/patches bit for quite sometime now 
as to how to get them into our build service for evaluation of patches 
and integrating them wherever possible. This got a major flip when Vikas 
asked me about the iceweasel/Firefox issue.

I was just talking with the iceweasel primary maintainer Mike Homney 
(the guy/person has got commit access on Firefox for about 2-3 years now 
because of his understanding and expertise on the mozilla project) and 
they have 20+ odd patches that they are holding and apart from 2-3 most 
of them will need to be held life-long (or till Firefox policies change 
radically).

He would be sending me the patches tonight as a favour as I don't want 
to spend around a GB of bandwidth which is what iceweasel's sources will 
take at the most an MB or two at most.

But before we get head-long into the discussion, let's see what patches 
are:-

the history of patch is as old as history of modern computing or in this 
case 1985.

Instead of me wasting breath or rather thought and typing let me point 
to wikipedia's article on the same issue :-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_%28Unix%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_%28computing%29

and last but not the least :-

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/dother.en.html#patches

This also reminded me of the debian-patcher service which I used to see 
till sometime back but hadn't for quite sometime.

My hunt for the same gave me the start of a thread last year :-

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/05/msg00888.html

This also resulted into this year's as well :-

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2015/05/msg00039.html

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=qa.debian.org;dist=unstable#_0_9_6

I have initiated personal communications with the gentleman who promises 
to bring it back soonish.

I could not interact with him on debian-devel as only DD's are allowed 
therein.

The other list that is mentioned in the newer thread (debian-admin) is a 
closed list because it probably would have lot of sensitive material 
such as precise nature of the build machines, ssh-keys to various 
infrastructure under the debian universe. Few years back I had asked 
about how many servers they had for the project and the count was around 
50 servers. Last 4-5 years the project has gained much momentum and I 
would not be surprised if the count has gone beyond 100 odd servers (and 
I'm not including build machines or/and the debian-mirror setup)

Back on-topic though. The Debian-derivatives also has a patch-list which 
could be looked through as well.

http://deriv.debian.net/patches/

See http://deriv.debian.net/ for the various derivatives from which 
those patches are derived.

Hopefully some of those patches would be of value to us.

Even if we think that it is a good way, how easily would it be 
integratable with our build scripts/build service and how do we maintain 
some sort of history and order from where they came from.

Right now, probably only Vikas would be able to answer those queries.
-- 
Regards,
Shirish Agarwal,
Community Lead,
Hamaralinux.org