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Comment by hsbauauvhabzb | Hacker News Reader

Do distro maintainers share patches, man pages, call home metrics and other data with other distros’ maintainers (and them back)?

Further, do they publish any change information publicly?

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> Do distro maintainers share patches, man pages, call home metrics and other data with other distros’ maintainers (and them back)?

Yes, at a minimum the patches are in the Debian source packages. Moreover, maintainers are highly encouraged to send patches upstream, both for the social good and to ease the distribution's maintenance burden. An automated tool to look for such patches is the "patches not yet forwarded upstream" field on https://udd.debian.org/patches.cgi

There should be a source package for every binary package, and patches are usually in a subdirectory of the package.

They usually send everything upstream, and everything is public in their source control. Some maintainers look at repology.org to find package stuff from other distros.

> ... do they publish any change information publicly?

This is utter FUD, of course they do, it is an open source distribution. Everything can be found from packages.debian.org

They even have a portal that publishes this information specifically, with statistics, and many notes as to why a specific change has been made: https://udd.debian.org/patches

Sorry to clarify, I mean in a way that’s easily parseable. I’m not pulling down source files of every dev installed on my system to inspect raw .patch files and take the time to understand the differences.

You seem to be assuming malice in an innocent question though, that’s on you.

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