SeekingSponsorship

Revision 3 as of 2008-11-25 17:18:10

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Seeking Sponsorship

If you have made a change to the package and you do not have rights to upload the package then you will need to seek a sponsor.

Note that most sponsorship is still done via debdiffs, and some sponsors will prefer that, so you may wish to attach a diff to the bug as well.

Generating a debdiff

To generate a diff against the package in the archive you can run the following command from your branch.

$ bzr diff -rbranch:../seccure

Linking to a bug

As you will need a bug report to seek sponsorship you should close it from your debian/changelog. Fill in the changelog entry and add the LP: #12345 entry and normal.

Now, you can tell bzr that this commit fixes that bug in launchpad, so when you commit use

$ bzr commit --fixes lp:12345

Alternatively, from Intrepid onwards putting the bug number in the changelog and using debcommit will do this automatically. (Make sure to use something of the form "LP: #12345, #12346"; if you leave out the space or the # then debcommit will not detect it. You can use debcommit -n to check what it's going to do.)

Now, when you push the branch to launchpad it will link the branch and the bug report.

Pushing to launchpad

N.B. Launchpad does not yet offer personal source package branches. When it does you will be able to use branch locations associated with the source package. For now we use +junk locations.

Now you should push the branch to launchpad so that it can be retrieved by others. You do this by pushing it to a branch under your user.

$ bzr push lp:~james-w/+junk/seccure-fix-12345

where you change "james-w" for your launchpad username.

If you linked a commit to a bug number using --fixes then this will show up on the bug page as having a possible fix for the bug.

This however does not currently generate any bug mail. What you should do is add a comment on the bug report stating that you have a fix available, and subscribe the relevant sponsor team. The comment should include a link to the branch that you pushed, using the lp: notation so that sponsors can easily grab your fix, e.g.

Hi,

I think my branch fixes this bug. I changed it to frob the wotsit
so that users can twiddle the blurp. Please review it for inclusion.

You can grab my branch from

  lp:~james-w/+junk/seccure-fix-12345

Thanks,

James

Dealing with feedback from sponsors

If a sponsor reviews your change and asks you to change something then you can do this fairly easily. Simply go to the branch that you were working in before and make the changes requested, and then commit.

$ bzr commit

Now you can push your changes up to launchpad as before, but bzr will have remembered where you pushed to, so you can simply run

$ bzr push

Now you can add another comment to the bug report, something like

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback, I have made all of the changes requested in
my branch. You can once again retrieve it from

  lp:~james-w/+junk/seccure-fix-12345

Thanks,

James

Once the sponsor has uploaded your change you can delete your local branch, and mark the branch on launchpad as merged, or delete it.