On So, 2005-12-18 at 17:19 +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > 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 very welcome your ideas. I think they have definitively the potential to improve the quality of both debian and ubuntu. > 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. Thank you for your invitation, I'm very interested in making this project a success. I think it is rather long term, though. > 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) on your wiki page, you mention explicitly getting packages from MOTUs, potential MOTUs and completely newcomers into debian. I really appreciate that. I agree that such an infrastructure is needed. People have already pointed out in this thread, that launchpad is supposed to address some of the points you mentioned in your email and on the wiki page. I'd like to comment on this, too: Launchpad is all about collaboration, yes, so it is an interesting tool for this project. Still, I don't think launchpad is the answer for the complete project scope. You are talking about "collaborative maintenance", this means several persons working on a specific debian source package. I'm not sure in what scope HCT will be able to address this, since it also defines a bit different workflow. Since VCS seem to be quite political, and there are a lot of opinions about that topic. I agree that a VCS is very useful to track changes. You want to use it for being able to track the contributions of a submitter. I agree that this feature is very useful to ubuntu as well, since we would this information for approving MOTU candidates. Therefore I don't want anyone to force a specific tool. Therefore I'd suggest that SVN should not be the only interface for submitting packages. svn-buildpackage is a really nice tool, I like it very much. But I also accept that some people refuse to use SVN, as well that some people refuse using launchpad and HCT because of political reasons. Therefore I'd rather using svn as 'backend', where all Meta information is used. But I'd really appreciate it, if there were alternative interfaces to submit contributions. I could imagine having an bidirectional svn <-> bzr gateway, so that bzr users can submitt via this tool as well. (as far as I heard hct will use bzr under the hoods as well, so perhaps this way we could gain hct as additional interface). An obvious simple interface would be raw source packages, uploaded by dput or other means. This is the only interface REVU currently provides. > 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". Not only to MOTUs. I think the scope can easily extended to quite every group maintained package or set of packages. I see no reason not to accept external help. > 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). I could imagine that the utnubu team will be interested in using such an infrastructure to invite newcomers getting their packages into debian and eventually into ubuntu as well. Therefore I added utnubu-discuss to CC: list as well. -- Reinhard Tartler <siretart@tauware.de>
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part