Re: Contacting Java packaging team
Hi Emmanuel,
Am Sun, Jun 16, 2024 at 10:40:02PM +0200 schrieb Emmanuel Bourg:
> That's a good idea, thank you.
You (all in the Java team) are welcome. I frequently profited from
your help.
> > I have some specific questions to the Java packaging team.
> >
> > - Do you feel good when doing your work in Java packaging team?
>
> Absolutely
That's always good to know.
> > - Do you consider the workload of your team equally shared amongst its
> > members?
>
> No but that's not an issue, everyone scratches the itches he wants.
>From my experience in other teams I'd recommend to reach out to team
members a bit more. I consider the coordintion inside the Perl team a
good example. Also the Python team does yearly meetings at DebConf.
This common team feeling might increase the productivity of the team.
Inside the Debian Med team besides yearly sprints we have quite good
experience with what we call "advent bug squashing party". In this
effort team members are try to close bugs in packages of other
Uploaders. This contributes to some interchange of packaging knowledge
and some common team feeling.
> > - Do you have some strategy to gather new contributors for your team?
>
> Not really.
I'd recommend to actively think about this. While its a time consuming
task to seek for new contributors it might have a nice return of
investment. I'd specifically try to involve upstream into packaging
efforts. Usually upstreams are happy if their code is packaged for
Debian (not sure if this is true in the Java world). Providing them
with some packaging knowledge might be a shortcut to packages that
receive good testing by people who perfectly know the functionality.
The problems Pierre described with upgrading Gradle might be some
indication that some more skilled packagers could help.
> > - In my packaging work I frequently contacted Java packaging team and
> > usually got help very quickly - thanks a lot for this. The only
> > thing I was not happy about is the fact that the team decided to make
> > the usage of Salsa CI extra hard. I've contacted the Salsa CI team
> > before and explicitly asked about this policy. They do not understand
> > and recommend to run Salsa CI as default but by no means even hide
> > the button to switch it on. Would you mind changing your policy about
> > this?
>
> There is no policy regarding Salsa CI in the Java Team, anyone who wishes to
> use it is free to do so.
I intentionally linked to some response I once received[2] which says:
"java-team have pipelines disabled by default". I consider this a
really unfortunate blocker to simply switch on Salsa CI. If there is no
policy to use Salsa CI or not please make sure developers will not need
extra hurdles to switch it on.
> Personally, I do not because it doesn't add value
> to my workflow. I'm also not a fan of the IRC spam induced, and in times of
> energy sobriety I feel that's a non-essential tool we can do without.
Regarding the "IRC spam": IMHO this is not a Salsa CI feature but
rather the KGB bot you can switch of. For me as someone who barely
speaks any Java and just crossing fingers that the upstream build system
works flawlessly it helps a lot to have some build log available online
very easily which I can link to in some mail to the Debian Java list to
get further help. This might be true for potential newcomers as well.
> > - Can I do anything for you?
>
> Just keep the good work :)
Thank you
Andreas.
[2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2021/04/msg00025.html
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