Re: Salsa - best thing in Debian in recent years? (Re: finally end single-person maintainership)
Hi!
On Sun, 19 May 2024 at 20:48, Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 19 May 2024, Bill Allombert wrote:
> > Also debbugs is a special case:
> > The debbugs Debian package (as opposed to the debbugs software) have never been
> > really maintained. I am actually one of the very few users of this package
> > and I tried several times to get the maintainers to do a new upload but they
> > were clearly not interested.
>
> It's more that I'm prioritizing spending my (very) limited Debian time
> on keeping bugs.debian.org and debbugs itself working (and [very slowly]
> developing a new version of Debbugs with a more modern design in the
> hopes that others will contribute.)
Everyone else has very limited time to contribute to Debian as well.
Therefore we all need to think about what is the most efficient
workflow.
Perhaps you could consider how you can be a force multiplier and scale
your work? You could for example add some of the recent contributors as
developers or maintainers at
https://salsa.debian.org/groups/debbugs-team/-/group_members so they
can review/merge/push code, and you could review all submissions at
https://salsa.debian.org/debbugs-team/debbugs/-/merge_requests and
grow those contributors into co-maintainers instead of just ignoring
them?
Perhaps you can also consider optimizing your git workflows? For
example in the case of
https://salsa.debian.org/debbugs-team/debbugs/-/merge_requests/19 you
could have simply pressed "Merge" and everything would be good. Now
you decided to not use any of the support Salsa/Salsa-CI provides, you
did extra work to cherry-pick some commits (but not all), added your
extra commit to break the build and now there is new follow-up work to
be done for lapses that could have been easily avoided if Salsa-CI was
enabled.. (I did submit MR!20 though, you can just merge it)
I started this thread "Salsa - best thing in Debian in recent years?"
by asking people who resist Salsa to at least try using it for a while
before criticizing it so much.
What happened in this episode is a case in point. You sit in a "local
optima" of your current workflow and are not willing to invest a bit
extra effort to get to a place where Salsa+Salsa-CI can benefit and
decrease your extra work burden. Now both you and me ended up having
to do extra work that could easily have been avoided..
Personally I like Salsa a lot, and collaboration with maintainers who
embrace Salsa is a breeze, and I feel that my limited Debian time is
relatively productive. That is all thanks to Salsa. I wish those who
are not yet using it would give it a sincere try.
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