How do you go about getting fixes put into linux packages?

Question

I need group4 decode in the Python Imaging Library, but in order to build it, I need to get some changes put into the distros libtiff-dev packages.

Having never done this kind of thing before, I'm curious about where to start. The changes I need in libtiff are the placement of the header files once libtiff is installed. Right now, libtiff drops its header files into /usr/include, but it only drops in

/usr/include/tiffconf.h  
/usr/include/tiff.h  
/usr/include/tiffio.h  
/usr/include/tiffio.hxx  
/usr/include/tiffvers.h

I need to add:

/usr/include/tif_config.h  
/usr/include/tif_dir.h
/usr/include/tiffiop.h

The patch in PIL I had to use to get all this going is from 2006 and is made against the 1.1.6 PIL library (PIL is now at 1.1.7), but I'm pretty sure I can't get these patches for PIL into pyPI distribution if it won't build in the distros.

So, how do you get changes into the distros. I don't need to change anything in libtiff, just in the way it gets delivered. I need to get those 3 files added to /usr/include

After that's done, I can push to get the fix into PIL.

Answer 1

There are two routes to getting fixes into Linux distributions. If the issue is distribution specific then the best place to start is the bug tracker for that distribution. You mentioned missing files, which is likely to be a distribution issue. (It's not quite clear from what you wrote why those files would be missing everywhere, are you sure they're not deprecated or something?)

• Redhat Bugzilla
• Debian bug tracker

If it's not distribution specific you could still go via the bug tracker for the distribution you use, but you could also go directly to the original author. Author details are normally available somewhere within each distribution.