[draft proposal]

Upstream

The greatest strength of open source is the ability for every one to improve and modify their software as they see fit. As good community members we would like to insure that we are as faithful as possible about pushing our improvements upstream.

The MozillaTeam has several upstream products that have varying degrees of openness. These products range from Adobe's Flashplayer to Sun's JVM to the FSF's Gnash.

Bug Triage

One of the key ways in which our users can help improve our products is by submitting good bug reports. It is then our responsibility to forward these reports upstream as necessary. I have had varying results when contact upstream maintainers, ranging from from 'go away you don't have enough market share for us to worry about', to extremely receptive.

Launchpad already has the capability to monitor upstream bug tracking systems. To insure that we are pushing high quality reports, we should appoint shepherds to work with upstream maintainers.

For more details on how we organize upstream triage, read the discussion of state Confirmed on page ["MozillaTeam/Bugs/States"]

Patches

Ideally, all Ubuntu issues will be correctly pushed upstream or promptly resolved with patches.

From a Ubuntu perspective, we have two types of patches 'common' and 'distro specific'.

Common patches are those that we feel are applicable for inclusion upstream. These patches should be pushed upstream. If the patch is rejected, we need to carefully consider why we are keeping it.

Distro Specific are those that we include to add Ubuntu specific features, these patches should be kept locally.

In order to keep development as flexible as possible we should develop a clear method of identifying patches and pushing them in and out of build trees. The Debian package build system provides a very clean method of doing this by placing all patches in the Debian/patches directory. For Firefox, a clean patching system will be a necessity as well as benefit as we comply with Mozilla's new QA standards.

I propose that we go through our packages and implement a modular patch management system. This does not need to be any more complicated than storing patches in Bazaar so that they can easily be maintained.

I also propose that we develop a naming prefix structure to indicate if a patch is 'common' or 'distro specific'.

[:CategoryMozillaTeam]