linux.conf.au Presentations
Source Code Management for distributions
Seminar
An operating system distributor has a great many challenges for their SCM ... included amongst these are:
- coordinating changes with the software authors, even when you don't have write access to their SCM system.
- dealing with the international, distributed nature of the FOSS community - often the best resources are not in the same place, and the SCM has to handle this without penalising some users with arbitrarily long delays.
- tracking what releases of a distribution are affected by what security bug-fix the vendor, or a security researcher has released.
- scaling up to the thousands of independent projects that make up a distribution (Debian for instance has ~12K source packages involved in it).
This paper will present a case study on the use of GNU Arch to address these and other issues in a Linux distribution. Both RCS Agnostic and Arch specific issues will be discussed.
Robert Collins
Robert has been developing open source software since ~1998, in a variety of projects - including (but not limited) to squid, cygwin and GNU Arch. Currently Robert is employed by Canonical Ltd, where he heads the GNU Arch team, which develops GNU Arch and related tools and software.
