Upstream
[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 improvments 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 product is submitting good issue report. It is then or responsibility to forward this issues upstream as necessary. I have had varying results when contact upstream maintainers. The results have ranged from 'go away you don't have enough market share for us to worry about' to very 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.
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 that we feel are aplicable 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 specif features. These patches will be kept locally.
I order to keep development as flexible we should develop a very 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 propse that we go through our packages break implement a modular patch management system. This does not need to be any more complicated than storing patches in bzr so that they can easily be maintained.
I also propose that we develop a naming prefix structure to indicated if a patch is common or distro specific.