[colug-432] Care and feeding of distro packages

[Damien Calloway]

Yes, this was very informative, thank you! The rest of my question are Debian specific. I joined their new maintainers list, so I will dig further. 

On Wed, Jul 14, 2021, at 10:23, Eric Garver wrote:
> 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.
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