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.

1 - 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

You should ensure that this diff has the changes you expect, no more and no less.

2 - 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.

It is not critical to have a link to a bug for every change you make, but if you are fixing reported bugs then linking to them will be useful.

3 - Pushing to launchpad

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/ubuntu/karmic/seccure/seccure-fix-12345

where you change "james-w" for your launchpad username, and "karmic" for the release that you are targetting.

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.

However, this usually isn't enough. What you should do is propose a merge so that the developers can find the change and review it.

To do this open your page in a browser, e.g.

$ bzr lp-open

if that fails, then you can use

$ xdg-open https://code.launchpad.net/~james-w/ubuntu/karmic/seccure/seccure-fix-12345

where most of the URL matches what you used for "push". Then you can use the link "Propose for merging into another branch", and then type in an explanation of your change in the "Initial Comment" box. Set the "Reviewer" to be either "ubuntu-main-sponsors" or "ubuntu-universe-sponsors" depending on whether the package is in main/restricted or universe/multiverse. Lastly click "Propose Merge" in order to complete the process.

4 - 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

Then you can reply to the request for changes explaining what you changed and asking for re-review, or reply on the merge proposal page in Launchpad.

CategoryDistributedDevelopment