Re: Question to Stefano, Steve and Luk about the organisation into packaging teams.
Hi again Patrick!
On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 10:31:04AM +0100, Patrick Schoenfeld wrote:
>On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 01:15:00AM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>
>> Of course, there are places where our work does need co-ordination,
>> like before a release. And those are the places where we often end up
>> needing large teams doing a lot of work just to do that co-ordination.
>
>Well, coordination is the one thing. But something that is lacking in
>Debian at all is serious Quality Assurance /while/ in a release cycle
>(we have some basic QA during the freeze period, because the release
>team needs to review every package that wants to get in, but that is..
>not much and not enough). As we are dependent on the work of volunteers
>we cannot solve this problem for the whole archive, but we should try to
>solve it at least for the core tools every user is dependent on, which
>is something were teams or a single big team would probably be a step in
>the right direction.
Sure, teams for the core packages would be good. I still don't agree
that a single team for all of those core packages would be good. And
fall-backs are often not a good plan either. What I've often seen
elsewhere is that naming fall-back options often does not work too
well: either the primary team will do the work and the secondary team
will not have the necessary knowledge when they do need to act, or the
primary team will end up leaving the work to the secondary team too
much of the time.
Convincing the people maintaining core packages alone to sort out
teams is the logical next step. Well, that and finding volunteers to
help them in those teams. That's something that's often much harder
than you might realise. As you're clearly interested in this idea, are
you ready to help with it? :-)
Another tack would be to get a team doing QA reviews of the core
packages, much as Steve Kemp and others started with security
reviews. There's a lot of work there...
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
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