Nice discussion at debconf

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Tom Arnold <t0m4rn0ld at gmail.com> [2009.07.27.0025 +0200]:
> I love the idea of more x-distro collab, but what I heard seems
> really complicated and daunting.

Yes, we definitely need to take complexity out of it. After all, the
goal should be something that is so conducive to use that people are
glad to use whatever vcs-pkg produces, not scared by it.

> Wouldn't it be easier to set up some independent (maybe with
> Debian money) rejected-patches.org with a gitorious install that
> maybe pulls all distro (or just rejected from upstream) patches
> and thus creates this central hub where everybody can look and
> pull in the bits one needs. Git may not be able to pull from every
> dvcs now, but that is just a technical problem that can be solved
> in a fairly straight forward manner.

This is not a bad idea, but I have a few reservations:

1. without any form of quality assurance, this repository will soon
   resemble a "dump" and the benefit will shrink (I think)

2. it will be hard to track patches and be able to automatically
   incorporate updates

3. it might be hard to share metadata about patches that way

4. it might be hard to identify and mark patches that overlap

5. without a standard baseline, you'll have to write code to pull
   patches from each distro and each VCS, potentially requiring
   O(mn) implementations, which might just not be maintainable.

-- 
 .''`.   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
 
"this week dragged past me so slowly;
 the days fell on their knees..."
                                                        -- david bowie
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