Re: Four days

[Johan Van de Wauw <johan.vandewauw@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 1:00 AM, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh@asheesh.org> wrote:

>
> And what other cultural improvements can we make to debian-mentors? What
> else can we do to make this place supportive and helpful for the progress of
> y'all mentees into sparkly Debian contributors and developers?

Not something that is implemented overnight, but I think there should
be a solution for new packages which are often useful for users, but
not (yet?) up to debian high standards. I really like the way ubuntu's
launchpad ppas are set up: anyone with an account can create an
archive and upload his source packages.
 If such an archive gives the chance to users to report bugs and also
the usage (eg popcon, download stats) of packages in that archive, it
could be used by sponsors to pick packages which actually have users.
And if it is not picked up by a sponsor at least the users can enjoy
the packaging work which was done.
Apart from that, I believe users in some cases better reviewers than
sponsors. A sponsor may complain about the standards version which is
not up to date with the latest version and/or some lintian errors, but
may not notice bugs which really limit the usability of the
application.

One could argue that such a packages - if they had a copyright review
- could go to experimental, but if a system like launchpad ppas would
exist (where you can upload new versions of a package without needing
a sponsor) the barrier is lowered even more.

What I dislike about this ppa system (and coming more on topic) is
that it does not really encourage towards becoming an official package
and also doesn't learn about how to work with these official packages.
Eg closing bugs by doing an upload, ...