Re: Alioth tracker
Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, 24 Jun 2014, Ole Streicher wrote:
>> I can imagine that behind any of the tickets on alioth there is a story
>> like this, so I don't want to bring my one onto the front.
>> So, how do we get rid of the ~200 open support requests?
>
> Join the team handling alioth and start working on those issues.
I thought that usually such requests should be done through an request
for help? (Is that valid for "pseudo packages" like a hypothetical
alioth one?) If the alioth admin team would openly request for help
(maybe on the Debian-News?), they may gain more attention for that.
I don't know anything about the internals of alioth, and from a quick
view into the issues I am not capable to help there. I would probably
break more that I could fix.
> Quite a few of the problems can be investigated without any special admin
> right. For the rest, some friendly interaction with current admins
> (for example via IRC on #alioth) might help them and might convince
> them to give you more rights.
Hmm, I thought that the bug tracker *is* actually made for interaction
with the admins. I would also again raise the point: why does alioth
have its own tracker and does not use the Debian bug tracking system?
> It's probably not the answer you were looking for. But we need people
> to do the work obviously.
If we would
* create a pseudo package for alioth, and use that for bug reports and
support requests
* create a mailing list for all other communication (like the latest
one: [#314699] reverse DNS entry for IPv6 [...]?)
it would be much simpler to get the work done.
To give some overview about the nature of the requests: Currently, 182
requests are open. From them, 8 are obviously spam:
314476, 314399, 314396, 314395, 314394, 314390, 314389, 314430
They are in the ticket database since a year, which shows that noone of
the admins actually looked through the request for such a long time!
Even these bugs can only be closed by the admins (not by me) -- and if
they were on bugs.debian.org, one just could hit the "report as spam"
button.
Also, there are ~75 requests like
* Please fix permissions/ACL/group of project xyz
* Please remove project xyz
* Please remove user abc
They would require some confirmation that the request is valid, but are
then done within a minute. This would already decrease the number of
open requests by half! There is no other way than to have trusted admins
to handle these cases.
Especially the "Fix permission" tasks (~25) are critical here since they
usually prevent people from actually accessing repositories, and the
repositories are the main workspace for us packagers!
The other ~100 requests are
* E-mail problems (mail lost, mailing list access etc.)
* Configuration change requests
* Software extension proposals
* Bugreports on the used software
which seem to take more work. If one counts only the problems
(bugreports or e-mail problems, this may be something of 40 requests.
BTW, the last issue that was actively closed by an alioth admin was on
August 2013 [#314410].
I don't see that your proposal would really solve the problem.
Best
Ole
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