[Pkg-alsa-devel] Converging with Ubuntu

[Jordi Mallach]

Hi list!

Since Ubuntu started forking Debian every 6 months, the changes made to
Debian ALSA packages have flowing in both directions with varied regularity.

Lately this team has been reduced to an overworked Elimar with me doing
mostly revision and sponsoring for his work, while the Ubuntu side has seen
a few different names managing the packages: keybuk, pitti, crimsun and now
TheMuso. While there were a few formal tries to bring all the Debian and
Ubuntu people under the same roof in the past, it hasn't really worked out
very well, and lately the Ubuntu diff has kept growing for no good reason.

So after talking to crimsun and TheMuso, I went ahead and added both of them,
the current active ALSA maintainers for Ubuntu, to the Pkg-ALSA project
in alioth, with the ultimate goal of bringing our delta down to 0, if
possible. Yesterday I took a few of the most straight-forward patches and
added them to the 1.0.17-1 uploads of alsa-tools and alsa-utils for
 experimental.

But there's quite a few more patches to deal with. What TheMuso and I have
planned is going over them one by one and seeing if they are still needed,
and applying them to the Debian SVN repo. So if anyone wants to help, please
have a look at the alsa diffs in http://patches.ubuntu.com/a/ and post
diffs with a short description on what the change does and why it was done
in Ubuntu.

FWIW, yesterday's alsa-tools upload should have reduced the diff to 0.
OTOH, alsa-utils includes changes to the way udev integration is handled,
which I really need some explanation for.

Hopefully having Daniel and Luke in the team will help us improve the
quality of the packages, as well as make Elimar's life a bit easier. :)

Thanks for all the past work, and welcome to the team, Luke and Daniel!

Jordi
-- 
Jordi Mallach Pérez  --  Debian developer     http://www.debian.org/
jordi at sindominio.net     jordi at debian.org     http://www.sindominio.net/
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