The five points raised in the vcs-pkg prep BoF

[martin f krafft]

Hey folks,

On Sunday night, we held an informal meeting among vcs-pkg folks to
talk a little bit about where we are, in preparation of Thursday's
roadmapping BoF.

I expected five people and somewhere around 25 or so showed up,
which was great. I had not prepared anything and so we engaged in
a discussion round again. Thanks a lot to the video team for showing
up at such a late hour, and even though video didn't make any sense,
you made it possible for people at home to participate.

I promised I'd send a short summary of the five issues discussed, so
here it comes:

1. standardising interfaces: we will not develop *the* workflow, and
if we did, it would not get accepted. Instead, we want to define
interfaces to make it possible for people across distros and VCSs to
exchange and track information.

2. concepts and entities: one of the main contributions we need to
make is to define exactly the concepts and vocabulary with which we
are working, so that there is a common basis and e.g. a common
understanding of what exactly is a patch or a modification, and what
does it mean to track that across time.

3. patch metadata: what are patch metadata and how should/could they
be standardised? How are they merged? Is the patch purpose something
for the consumer to decide, or to what degree should a distro
isolate patches that are distro-specific?

4. stay on the ground: we need to ask ourselves what makes sense.
Are feature branches overkill? How many conflicts do we actually
expect throughout the maintenance cycle of a package? Do we want to
cater for cross-VCS exchange? Many such questions need to be
considered when making a roadmap.

5. abstraction: NMUers and others are faced numerous different
systems, from VCS to patch and build systems. It would be nice if
there were some sort of abstraction or standardisation. Defining
interfaces makes it possible for different tools to co-exist, but
there should be one default so that the users don't need to be
confronted with too much choice.

I hope this was all. If you have anything to add, please do.

See you Thursday at 10 in the BoF room.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at d.o>      Related projects:
: :'  :  proud Debian developer               http://debiansystem.info
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck    http://vcs-pkg.org
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
 
"the unexamined life is not worth living"
                                                             -- platon
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