Re: Debian-Gentoo collaboration on GNU/Hurd ports

[Jon Portnoy]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2003 at 11:05:59PM +0100, Robert Millan wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
> Thinking about the Gentoo GNU/Hurd (whatever..) project, it seems that
> whereas Gentoo and Debian are "competing" projects, the Debian GNU/Hurd
> and Gentoo GNU/Hurd share one goal: to port a lot of software.
> 

I'm not sure I agree that Gentoo and Debian are competing projects, but 
you're right, we do share a common goal in relation to the Hurd.

Of course, for a while we're going to be playing some serious catch-up - 
Debian has, what? Five years of work behind their Hurd port? However 
we'd be happy to engage in mutual contributions.

> It'd be interesting if we could discuss some ways of cooperation
> between Debian GNU/Hurd and Gentoo GNU/Hurd projects for porting
> duties. This way we'll avoid horrible things like reporting the
> same bugs twice, discussing the same bugs twice and fixing the same
> bugs twice.
> 
> Some questions i come up with:
> 
> - where to discuss a porting problem? debian-hurd was typicaly
> used for that. a possibility is to use help-hurd for common porting problems
> and the specific lists for the distro-specific bugs. or perhaps we
> could create a common porting list?

help-hurd seems appropriate for general discussion of porting issues, 
unless someone has a problem with that.

> 
> - how do we share patches? there are a lot of usable patches in the
> debian packages that haven't been forwarded upstream yet. there are
> more of them pending to be applied in the debian BTS. In principle, a
> Gentoo porter should look at these places if he/she wants to avoid
> duplicating work, but it'd be interesting to define a "protocol" on
> what to do with patches once they're made, to ensure everyone gets them.

I agree, but I don't have any decent ideas for this at the moment beyond 
announcing patches to help-hurd/bug-hurd so those working on both ends 
can grab them.

> 
> - what about API porting-related bugs in the Hurd and Glibc? the debian BTS
> entries for hurd, libc0.3 and libc0.3-dev contain porting-related bugs.
> (ala, "function foo(), needed for package bar, is broken or unimplemented")
> maybe we should copy and forward them to the Savannah BTS?
> 
> -- 

Collaboration on the Savannah BTS would be handy.

-- 
Jon Portnoy
avenj/irc.freenode.net