[Gnewsense-dev] bug upstreaming primer

[Karl Goetz]

Hi all,
I was just speaking with ecadre and remarked that one way to help gns
is to forward our freedom bugs upstream (most of our bugs probably, but
lets starts with the important stuff), and I offered to write an email
here to give a quick description of how to go about it.

The goal:
Have all our freedom related bugs *related to Debian* forwarded to
Debian. Note that if its not related to Debian (aka, not a DFSG
violation) it shouldn't be forwarded.
See /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/policy.txt.gz for Debian policy,
Section 2.1 for the DFSG.

Your setup:
I'm assuming a release of gNS, but any Debian derivative (eg Trisquel)
would do.
Add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list

# Source debian repositories for freedom verification
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main

Run 'apt-get update' to pull down the latest package lists, and you
should be able to 'apt-get source'.

To ease source downloading, install the 'devscripts' package, which
will provide you with dget (useful for downloading single packages
without modifying sources.list), and install 'apt-file' to help locate
files moving between packages.

Checking packages:

Find a bug in savannah. Before forwarding we need to confirm the
freedom bug really exists.

# we don't want to pollute our home dir.
mkdir pfv
cd pfv

apt-get source <packagename>
[stuff on screen]

cd <packagename>-*

look at the relevant/suspect files for headers excluding distribution,
modification, use, or anything that means it doesn't match the dfsg.
Note when forwarding bugs to Debian, thats what matters, not the fsf
definitions.

Forwarding bugs:
Use the following format for messages:

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <address@hidden>
Subject: May contain non-free data (customise as appropriate)

In the body of the email, include the following:
Package: <package name>
Version: <version, blank for all/any>
Severity: serious
Justification: fails dfsg <cite relevant part for bonus points>
User: <your address>
Usertags: gns
Usertags: libreplanet

<rest of the email containing detailed information>


For the usertags have gns for any bugs filed by our project, use
libreplanet for anything thats generic to all free distributions (all
freedom bugs should be in both these tags).

Thats it.

PS. this should really be in the wiki, perhaps under something
like /WorkingWithUpstream/ForwardingBugs. Thoughts on the page title?
kk

-- 
Karl Goetz, (Kamping_Kaiser / VK5FOSS)
Debian contributor / gNewSense Maintainer
http://www.kgoetz.id.au
No, I won't join your social networking group

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