Distro version migration nastiness

About

While preparing the 8.2 release (including the Fedora 9 rebase), we found ourselves having to re-include dirty OLPC-specific package changes from the older Fedora 7 releases. In fact, a number of the F9-induced bugs were caused simply from accidently losing the OLPC-specific changes we applied to packages in F7.

Due to time constraints we find ourselves having to reinclude those changes in the F9 packages and hence will probably see the same issues when rebasing in future. So we decided to create this page which documents those changes, hopefully making it easier to rebase in future.

It is also important for us to work towards making this list as small as it possibly can be, so that rebasing in future is not as difficult as it is now.

8.2.0 nastiness

• <trac>7294</trac>: we are including an ov7670 kernel camera driver patch before it is merged upstream (plus I don't know that it is correct). The other option is to modify gstreamer like we did for F7. I'm not entirely sure which option is correct and V4L upstream have so far been unresponsive to my 2 emails.
• <trac>7319</trac>: We are forking an OLPC-3 branch of telepathy-salut so that we can include 2 patches needed for collaboration to work with rainbow. Upstream have rejected those patches. We should come up with an upstream-acceptable solution for future releases.
• <trac>7252</trac>: The ov7670 driver shipped upstream exhibits an occasional hang-on-boot condition. In the OLPC kernel we reverted the upstream commit and have applied a "sledgehammer"-style workaround to avoid initialization delays at boot/resume.
• gnash: Tomeu created an OLPC-3 branch in order to avoid building a load of unneeded stuff which had extra dependencies (Qt plugin, etc). This kind of thing should probably be pushed into Fedora as a whole.
• <trac>7353</trac>: forked a number of packages to remove unneeded dependencies. totem is the worst (removing gnome-desktop), but we'll also want slimmed down ntp and mtd-utils to remove perl dependency, removing PersonalCopyLite midi patches from SDL_mixer, etc.
• Network manager: Our F7 0.6.5 package has various OLPC specific patches for the msh interface which were not applied (accepted?) upstream. NM 0.7 has changed significantly and the patches do not apply...
• xulrunner is forked with some OLPC-specific patches, and adjusted compilation options to exclude libgnome and gnomevfs dependencies.
• xorg-x11-server forked to remove Fedora's patch which disables evdev for keyboards (we need evdev)
• ntp forked to split ntpdate into its own package, removing the perl dependency. upstream have plans to address this.
• totem-pl-parser has an evil dependency chain through its use of libcamel. forked it with a hacky patch to remove the dependency (affected functionality is of no use to us). upstream may consider a proper solution if someone steps up to do the work
• xorg-x11-utils forked to remove xdriinfo and it's mesa dependencies. I have asked upstream if they are willing to help us avoid this fork in future.