draft v1.1

When interacting with others who know us personally, our most valuable asset is often our individual reputation. When interacting with others who may not know us personally, we depend on the reputation of our community.

Upstream

On the Mozilla Team, we will often be interacting with upstream communities whose members may not know us personally. As such, we will need to depend on our team reputation and Ubuntu reputation.

When upstreams receive issue reports from us, we want them to know that they are complete and well documented. When they receive patches from us we want them know that they are high quality and well tested.

We want them to know we are good community members.

Bug Triage

We can establish our team's reputation by submitting good bug reports upstream.

????

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, CategoryBugSquad