[Debian-on-mobile-maintainers] Bug#985893: Forking on MMSD

[Chris Talbot]

Hello!

On Wed, 2021-04-14 at 23:09 +0100, Wookey wrote:
> On 2021-04-14 18:39 +0000, Marius Gripsgard wrote:
> 
> > I would really like to avoid a fork, it's not worth doing dual
> > work. Did you ping ofono devs at irc?  Also have you sent upstream
> > patches? If a fork is the way you want to go, you will need to
> > rename it as the existing packages need to follow upstream, we
> > can't
> > just rip an existing packages away from upstream.
> 
> Debian can package mmsd with whatever set of patches it sees fit. If
> the end result is ChrisT's version, with Modem Manager support, then
> I
> think that's reasonable. mmsd is not currently packaged in debian so
> I
> don't think a rename is required. Ultimately it's up to maintainers
> to
> choose which upstream is most appropriate. There used to be only one,
> but increasingly one gets a choice of varying degrees of active
> maintenance. (This can be a huge pain making life quite awkward for
> maintainers, and I find Debian is the only org trying to unify a
> diverse set of versions where a load of people have scratched their
> own itch and then just left it like that.)
> 

At this point, fork of mmsd should still work with ofono. I have not
disturbed anything ofono related, and have made several improvements to
the core that should benefit ofono too.

I would in addition welcome someone from ofono to work with me! I would
rather mmsd work with both stacks (as we all benefit from that). The
Mobian and PostmarketOS developers have welcomed me, and I am happy to
work with you all too. I joined the UBports matrix channel and
introduced myself (in addition to asking how you all contact the ofono
folks), you are free to reach out to me.

> Ultimately we want the best functionality for our users, and if the
> old upstream has been inactive for years then using this new,
> maintained version of mmsd may well be the best course. Efforts
> should
> continue to either give Chris access to the original repo or
> officially declare it 'under new management' so that there is a
> canonical place for the codebase, but in the meantime it's OK for
> debian to have a big patch.
> 

I admittedly do not know who to contact for repo access? I asked on the
Kernelnewbies IRC/Mailing list (as I am a bit of a kernel newbie), but
I did not hear anything back.

I am not trying to start a fork because I want to, and if you look at
Ofono's ML history, you can see that I have tried a lot to work with
upstream. I am starting a fork because I feel this is the only way I
can really move forward in getting MMS working. Without MMS,
unfortunately the Pinephone I have is little more than a toy with me,
and I put a lot of work into getting MMS working on the Modem Manager
stack.

> Versioning could be tricky in some situations, but SFACT the ofono
> mmsd is just 0.0 so the debian version can be 0.0.something and
> remain
> compatible with a shift back to that repo at some point.
> 
> Wookey

Thank you!

Respectfully,
Chris Talbot