9.1 Proposal: Fedora integration

[C. Scott Ananian]

This is another talk I'd really rather someone else give, but I can
give a brief talk on our current status & problems & desires if it is
helpful.

OLPC has forks of a number of Fedora packages, for a number of
reasons.  We've been trying to keep better track of the what & why, at
  http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Distro_version_migration_nastiness
(great page name, eh? ;-)

There are a number of tools that could make manging this divergence
and pushing changes upstream easier.  I've talked some recently with
J5 about work he's been doing on this front.  To start with: some sort
of notification mechanism to let us know if a new upstream release has
occurred for a package we have forked would be invaluable, as would
the ability to easily generate lists of "forked packages" and see the
exact patches applied.  Making it easier to apply the OLPC "packaging
patches" to new upstream versions would help, too.  Tools to
automatically monitor dependencies, so that we can immediately detect
when perl sneaks back into our build, and act to get rid of it.
Better integration of Red Hat bugzilla and OLPC trac.  J5 has also
mentioned "workflow tools" which would make it easier to guide new
OLPC developers through tasks like "fork a Fedora package for OLPC,
apply the OLPC patch, and notify the upstream developer".

I can present some of these ideas, and solicit attendees to go off and
write tools to improve the situation. ;-)  But if someone wants to
present a concrete proposal for "how I plan to make Fedora integration
better for 9.1" I'd love it.
 --scott

-- 
                         ( http://cscott.net/ )