Seeking for Upstream mentorship
This message might be offtopic depending on derivate people being also
upstream of their own software package or not.
I have found a debian-upstream mailing list (
https://lists.debian.org/debian-upstream/ ) but I have choosen not to
write there because there is not many traffic on it (seems dead).
1) Debian mentorship
First of all let me explain what I think is Debian mentorship because
I will use it as a base for further explanations. I have been reading:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMentorsFaq and
http://mentors.debian.net/intro-maintainers but there's not a direct
definition or something similar that convinces me. (Feel free to adapt
it and use it on the Debian wiki pages).
Custom definition: Debian mentorship is a workflow set in Debian so
that current Debian developers can teach and assist to-be package
maintainers. Usually an sponsor will initially check the package
technical requirements in Debian and ask for the maintainer to meet
them correctly. Finally it might upload the package to the Debian
repository.
So what I mean is that once a to-be maintainer submits a draft of
package the Sponsor can help him to meet minimum Debian requirements.
2) Upstream mentorship (desired)
Upstream mentorship is a workflow set in
Upstream-FOSS-Mentorship-site so that experienced Upstream FOSS
developers can teach and assist other upstream FOSS maintainers. Usually
an sponsor will initially check the upstream source code release
technical requirements so that they meet commonly accepted design,
workflow, copyright and standards targeted at their upstream package.
Then he asks for the maintainer to meet them correctly. Finally it might
certify his released source code as FOSS-Community-friendly.
Depending on the nature of your FOSS software the FOSS maintainer can
be redirected to different kind of mentor people: E.g. Xorg mentors or
Perl mentors with their own mailing lists.
3) Upstream mentorship (in practice)
I will be very happy if there was a mailing list similar to Debian
mentors mailing list ( http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors ) but
aimed at Upstream people.
4) Current resources
4.1) I have found: Upstream Guide Debian wiki page (
https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide ) which it's quite good indeed.
4.2) I remember having using Savannah Non GNU forge site from GNU
years ago where there was some kind of mentoring but aimed only at
Copyright. The Copyright needed to be perfect in every file and so on.
If the Copyright minimum requirements were not met you were not
allowed to upload any code to their forge. Here there are some related
instructions:
http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/HowToGetYourProjectApprovedQuickly/ .
5) Example based on Rescatux / Rescapp
These are some questions that I would ask in such a list. You are not
supposed to answer them. It's just for making clear that my questions
are more aimed at development design that final release or copyright
(although I'm also interested).
5.1) Rescapp, my main program, is based on Python. Currently it adds
dinamically rescue-targeted scripts to a self-building pyqt menu. What's
the advised way of dealing with plugins in Python? And what about PyQT?
5.2) Current Rescatux, which it's a distro, source code contains
Rescapp source code in it as is. Am I supposed to keep a separated GIT
repo for each one of the applications in my distro ? How do I handle
each of them as if they were one GIT repo to ease development?
5.3) Is there any script for checking every script and their
copyright and add to them a default copyright based on GPLv3 and my name?
5.4) Rescapp, currently lives at the Debian live desktop user
directory and it's path is hardcoded. How do python programs deal with
hard coded paths usually?
6) Some more thoughts
As you can see some of my questions can be answered by reading
Upstream Guide Debian wiki page ( https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide
) and some others could be answered if I look for Python information and
probably subscribe to a Python or PyQT newbie mailing list.
Anyways I am still lacking a central place where a
FOSS-Wannabe-Developer can be mentored by more experienced people and
then, if needed, directed to specific projects for seeking more
specialized help.
I am thinking on packaging Rescapp for Debian, probably next year,
but I always come to the conclusion about Rescapp not being an upstream
package per self and not being good enough. That's why I have written
this long email.
I am also discarding debian-upstream mailing not only because of its
low traffic but because it's aimed at matching Debian criteria and not
common FOOS criteria. Anyway you can convince me otherwise.
7) Finally
7.1) Is there a place like the one I have described in either
"Upstream mentorship (desired)" or "Upstream mentorship (in practice)"?
7.2) Isn't there and we need to make it up?
7.3) Is debian-mentors mailing list the place I am looking for
because in practice it's not focused in Debian only?
Thank you for feedback and sorry if such questions have been already
covered. Please point me to another Debian mailing list if this is not
the right place to ask this.
adrian15
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