All distributions seem to end up carrying some custom distro grown patchset, with some patches being shared and other patches being unique per distro. Clearly not an ideal situation and one which most distributions try to avoid by feeding all necessary changes upstream and aiming for having packages which use the upstream provided code as is.

Clearly the usual model of sharing code fixes / integration work done at the distribution level between distributions by pushing it upstream does not work for projects where there is no upstream. And even with upstream around, distributions sometimes needs to fix bugs in versions that upstream no longer care about or fix bugs that are not important/considered feature upstream and it may take a long time to get them fixed there. In the end we can't avoid all patching. But we can try to avoid duplicating the work by better sharing the results.

The plan for this sessions is to give a short presentation sketching the problem, show two possible approaches to help solving this problem together with few generally helpful ideas. After presenting these hopefully somewhat structured discussion with the audience about this topic is planned.