I have to fess up – i just sent what will either be the most laughable email folks ever read, or things will work out and i won’t feel so stupid (’bout this anyway). to sum up the gist: i just emailed a ton of other distro perl maintainers (sun, mandriva, fedora, debian, freebsd) with this crazy idea about putting together a site to pool our patching resources at – a way for distributors of perl and perl modules (not cpan – next tier, the linux/bsd/solaris distributors) to share patches and lessons learned in getting packages working sanely, to avoid reduplication of effort and (didn’t say this in the email, it sounds too…wishy washy) foster a common community between vendors.
i still feel like a dolt for sending it, but the idea pops into my head every few months, and this time i figured it should either be shot down or not for once and all.
The crazy part about it is that you _need_ to maintain a patchset like this. Does upstream not like accepting your patches? FWIW, us X folks have a list similar to this: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/x-packagers — and it’s nearly dead, even though everybody relevant is subscribed. I’m sure fd.o would also be open to having *-packagers lists and even CVS/git/whatever modules for patch maintenance.
Most of the participants who are active at all are on IRC anyhow, though.
It’s more that there are patches that aren’t relevant upstream, or even really patches in some cases. The perl ebuild, for instance, has some patches associated with it that will never go upstream (reversed @INC loading, for instance), but that someone else might find useful.