[colug-432] Care and feeding of distro packages

[Eric Garver]

On Tue, Jul 13, 2021 at 08:31:53PM -0400, Damien Calloway wrote:
> Hello !
> 
> 
> I am seriously considering adopting an orphaned Debian package called Qtile.
> (Yeah, I know, some people adopt children, some people adopt pets.....)
> 
> Have any of you maintained any packages for a distro before ? What is the
> time commitment and workflow for that ?

Disclaimer: I'm the firewalld maintainer. So I'm fortunate enough to
influence "upstream" and the package in RHEL/Fedora.

I maintain a few packages in RHEL and Fedora. Mostly firewalld.

Time commitment depends heavily on the package. If the package is very
active and popular it can be fairly time consuming. You may backport
fixes weekly. If it's not very active, then you may only rebase the
package a couple times a year.

Workflow depends on the distribution. Even though RHEL and Fedora are
RPM based the workflow is very different. I have never packaged anything
for Debian. I have done a few packages for pkgsrc and that's very, very
different than deb/rpm.

For RPM (Fedora) it's basically:

    1. clone the package repository
    2. update the RPM spec file (e.g. add patches)
    3. build/test locally
    4. push the package update to the repository
    5. submit the new build to "testing". It will propagate to "stable"
       once enough users have +1'd it.

You can also submit package updates via pull requests. That way the
current/active maintainer can review/approve them. This may be a good
way to get your feet wet and see if you like it.

Additionally, you're basically a liaison between the distribution's
users and the upstream project. Distro users will report bugs and you'll
have to find the upstream bug fix or propagate the bug report to
upstream. This includes a first level of triage.

> As I see it, once the current version of the app is packaged, I only have to
> watch for updates to the app and any messages about people who cannot build
> it on their machines. Is that correct ?

Bug fix updates are usually easy/trivial. Feature releases are more
work. You may hit build issues, test failures, dependency changes, etc.
The bigger the package the more common these scenarios are.

Distribution users don't typically build the package on their machine.
They just install the binary deb/rpm.

Hope that helps.
Eric.