Epic Summary

This Epic focuses on the systematic process of contributing our internal patches to the corresponding upstream open-source projects. By successfully getting our patches accepted upstream, we will reduce the number of patches our team must maintain, thereby decreasing our long-term maintenance burden and improving the stability and predictability of our build process. This effort is a direct follow-on to the patch audit and is a key part of our overall strategy to reduce technical debt.

Business Case

Each internally maintained patch represents a deviation from the upstream codebase, creating ongoing work for our team with every new release of a component. This work includes forward-porting patches, resolving merge conflicts, and re-validating the changes. This not only consumes valuable engineering time but also introduces a risk of divergence and incompatibility.

By contributing patches back to their upstream projects, we:

• Reduce maintenance overhead: Eliminates the need for our team to re-apply and test patches for every new version.
• Improve code quality: Subjects our changes to the scrutiny and review of the broader open-source community, leading to more robust solutions.
• Strengthen community relationships: Reinforces Red Hat's commitment to the open-source communities we rely on and enhances our influence in those projects.
• Decrease technical debt: Aligns our software supply chain more closely with the community standard, reducing complexity and risk.

This Epic directly supports the initiative's goal of having only justified, well-managed patches and aligns with our organizational objective of engineering excellence and sustainable development practices.

Out of Scope:

• Upstreaming patches for projects that are no longer actively maintained or where the contribution process is prohibitively complex.
• Fundamental architectural changes that are not aligned with the upstream project's direction. These require a different strategic approach.

Team Sign Off: