I’m trying to put together a SELinux packaging team for Debian and Ubuntu. Current SELinux is still a major pita to get running… so we need to join our efforts in adopting policy to our needs and such.

Upstream development is of an rather “uncooperative” model: both the selinux libraries and the reference policy are updated by a single person each, by exporting an internal VCS to a public CVS on sourceforge. If you want to add patches, you always have to send them through a mailing list, and hope for them to appear in the archive sometime soon. Or not.

While this works okay for the libraries and utilities - which are fairly stable by now - I have doubts that this is appropriate for the policy. Given the amount of fixes/additions we’ll need at least for the reference policy, I think more people should have write access to a shared repository. For this I’ve setup a subversion repository on svn.debian.org, with currently two branches: unmodified upstream and a debian branch. Note that we might also switch to an arch repository, when some big contributors prefer so.

If users of other distributions (Gentoo?) want to join, they are welcome to do so. They can have their own branch, of course, albeit I don’t think it’s really necessary (maybe I should have named the “debian” branch “alioth-trunk” or so…)

Basically anything is okay with me, that helps the reference policy and SELinux in picking up speed.

If you’d like to get write access, send me an email with your alioth user id. Given the “unmodified upstream” branch, it should be fairly easy to extract patches from our repository to be included upstream, too.