Future SCM Technology

Horst H. von Brand vonbrand at inf.utfsm.cl
Sun Jun 10 04:15:26 UTC 2007


[I'm a long time RH/Fedora user, but I don't maintain any packages and
 don't know much about the exact workflow being considered here.]

Jeffrey C. Ollie <jeff at ocjtech.us> wrote:
> It's F7+5 and F8T1-57 (yes, less than two months until F8T1 under the
> current schedule[1]).  If we are going to replace CVS[2] with another
> SCM for hosting the Fedora Package Repository we need to get started
> now!  And to get things started, we need to discuss what kinds of
> workflow we want our new SCM to support.
> 
> Here's a list of things to think about (thanks to Jeremy Katz):

You need to split this up into what the individual maintainer has to do,
and what has to be done centrally. Consider tools for the maintainer,
not centrally handled stuff.

> * How do we make it easier for a maintainer to rebase their package to a
> newer upstream?

Maintainer only, depends too much on what upstream does. Better tools
for this are generally useful, getting various upstreams to work in a
more uniform/structured way would be much help...

> * How do we make it easier for a maintainer to develop, test, and create
> a patch to fix a problem that's being experienced in Fedora?

Maintainer mostly, I see little help possible here. Perhaps easy access
to bugzilla'd testcases, tools for automated testdrives? Again, better
tools for doing all this in general would be most helpful.

e> * How do we make it easy to send these patches to the upstream of the
> project being worked on?

Ask upstream how they want it done... Maintainer only.

> * How do we enable downstreams to take our bits, track them and make
> changes as they need/want?

Who is "downstream" here? Derived distributions? They will probably just
take the SRPMs and add their own patches/tweaks.

> * How do we better enable a user who has a problem with something we
> ship to be able to fix it themselves and get the fix back to us?

Not by forcing them to melt into whatever wonderful mesh Fedora builds
for this, for sure.


In the preceding I see little any centrally managed infrastructure can
do to help the individual maintainer with their relationship to
upstream. Assorted better tools are needed, but that is not a Fedora
exclusive, and far from SCM-bound.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria             +56 32 2654239
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