"community maintainers working on core" dilemma (was: Re: [fab] rant: why does it take so long to prepare a firefox update for FC5?)

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, 2006-08-09 at 11:55 -0400, Greg DeKoenigsberg wrote:
> On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> 
> > Greg DeKoenigsberg schrieb:
> > > On Tue, 8 Aug 2006, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
> > >> Further: How could Red Hat help? *Red Hat should ask for help in 
> > >> situations like this!* There are a lot of people around in 
> > >> Extras/Fedora-land that are willing to help in situations like this, but 
> > >> probably nobody is going to step up without a external trigger. We are 
> > >> used to @redhat-maintainers that take care of their packages on their own.
> > > +1.
> > > So let's ask this question: why are we not making more progress on the 
> > > "community maintainers working on core" dilemma?
> > > 
> > > The answer, from where I sit: we're bogged down in technical details.
> > 
> > Agreed.
> > 
> > [...]
> > > The next question, then: what processes can we put in place that will
> > > allow trusted community developers to submit patches in a "fast track"  
> > > way, such that the official RH maintainer can simply take a quick look,
> > > rebuild, and release?
> > 
> > My preferred variant:
> > 
> > 1. community developer commits his changes to a version control system
> > somewhere
> 
> OK.  So let's say, for the sake of argument, we create a CVS mirror called 
> "fedora-core-community" or some such, out on cvs.fedora.redhat.com.  This 
> immediately brings us to tricky question #1:
> 
> How do we sync from fedora-core to fedora-core-community, and when?

With bzr as the VCS this would be incredibly easy:
<me> $ bzr branch http://vcs.fedoraproject.org/repos/foo/devel foo
<me> $ cd foo
<me> $ vim foo.spec
<me> $ bzr commit foo
<me> $ bzr push foo sftp://my.httpserver.org/repos/foo
<me> $ mail core at fedora -s 'New Patch at
http://my.httpserver.org/repos/foo' 

<core> $ bzr checkout sftp://vcs.fedoraproject.org/repos/foo/devel foo
<core> $ cd foo
<core> $ bzr merge http://my.httpserver.org/repos/foo
<core> $ bzr diff |less
<core> $ bzr commit
<core> $ make build

So there's essentially no need for us to create, maintain, and sync a
fedora-core-community server.  Any other distributed vcs which can work
with a standard http/sftp server can have a similar workflow.  A
distributed vcs that requires a Smart Server (cgi script, running server
process, etc) instead of a dumb http/sftp server will probably have the
capability to email "bundles" (patches that include version control
information so you can do a merge operation with it.) between developers
so the community member doesn't have to set up a special server on their
end.

The advantage of using the VCS/bundles rather than patches is when
merging.  If <core> has done development on the package since <me>
branched their version of the package <core> has more information to
merge the changes back in.

I would rather see this exchange happen in bugzilla rather than via
email, though.  Simply because bugzilla will keep a record of what's
happened to the bug while the email conversation could get lost.

-Toshio
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