Proposal for collaborative maintenance of packages

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

[ Sorry for the crosspost, but the subject is of interest to many people ]

Hello everybody,

following the last discussion at the Debian-QA meeting on Darmstadt, it
appears that the proposal called "Collaborative maintenance" is of generic
interest :
- for Debian sponsors and Debian mentors
- for QA which may use the infrastructure for orphaned packages
- for Ubuntu's MOTU School

I tried to describe the big lines of the project in this wiki page:
http://wiki.debian.org/CollaborativeMaintenance

I'm crossposting this to all people involved (even people responsible of
the REVU tool used by Ubuntu) because I'm sure that we should all work
together to realize this project. 

This infrastructure is seriously needed in Debian because: 
- team maintenance with SVN is more and more popular, and a good web
  interface above a SVN repo of Debian packages would help all those
  teams
- an official way to follow interaction between mentors and sponsors is
  needed and actual mentors.debian.net/sponsors.debian.net are not enough
  for that
- we need to facilitate the work of sponsors because we're lacking
  sponsors
- we need to let skilled external contributors maintain packages for us
  (when they don't want to become DD)

The very same reasoning applies even more to Ubuntu where packages do not
have an official maintainer. Changes on packages have to be monitored to
know if a package needs to be uploaded. Also they have the same
problematic of "sponsoring" with their "MOTU school".

Furthermore, if we can standardize this infrastructure between
Debian/Ubuntu, it will be easier to integrate packages created by Ubuntu
MOTU in Debian (I'm speaking of packages which don't exist in Debian yet).

That's why I'm bringing this proposal forward now. I've recently
discovered the REVU tool which addresses part of the same problematic in a
different way ... and the sooner we work together, the better. :)

FWIW, I have an alioth project ready to be used :
http://alioth.debian.org/projects/collab-maint/

I'm waiting on your feedback and I hope that we can find a good basis on
which to work together.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://www.ouaza.com

Freexian : des développeurs Debian au service des entreprises
http://www.freexian.com