On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 04:49:47PM +0100, Phil Bull wrote: > Sorry, I've been meaning to reply for a few days and hadn't quite gotten > around to it. I'm not at UDS I'm afraid, but I should be able to > dedicate a weekend or two to this at some point in the near future. No problem. [ FWIW: I'm ad UDS right now and will be available until Thursday evening. If you think we could benefit from a F2F discussion about the subject here, feel free to point me to the appropriate peer. I'll then take care of proxying information to Debian people as needed, once back. ] > This is definitely a very big task, so we'll need to get a sizeable > number of contributors together (around 20 would be workable, I think). > The work wouldn't be difficult, but getting things right takes time. It > would be good to organise a "Jam" (c.f. Bug Jams) one weekend on IRC, > and to come up with an efficient way of editing descriptions in bulk > (filing bugs for each package sounds nightmarishly time consuming). So, Debian side, package descriptions are maintained by individual package maintainers and not centrally (I believe it's the same on the Ubuntu side, although you probably have more liberal commit write access to a wide range of packages). That means that for us the interface between the text review work and the actual adoption of the description improvement is the Debian bug tracking system (-l10n folks, please correct me if I'm wrong!). Of course that does not stop to have a sprint which, for the limited time of the sprint, works using a different mechanism (e.g. etherpad-s) and that, at the end of it, "serializes" the produced texts in a set of bug reports (with patches!) sent to the appropriate packages. I quite like the idea of a similar spring and it looks like it can be organized in a very non-invasive manner. It's not up to me however to say whether something like the above will fit with the -l10n plans. Guys, can you please comment on that? If it's something we, on the Debian side, we like too, it would be nice to have it as a joint event, and I'll be happy to advertise it myself a bit. > We have some draft guidelines [1]; it would be good to generate some > discussion around these, and to get a finished version officially > adopted by Debian/Ubuntu. We do have some guidelines too [2], although I haven't checked how they compare with yours. [2] http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/best-pkging-practices.html#bpp-desc-basics > Also, I think it makes most sense to work directly upstream on this (in > Debian). Patching in Ubuntu and then forwarding upstream seems > inefficient to me. The issue here for me is that I'm not familiar with > the workings of the Debian community, so I'm not sure how a potentially > project-wide scheme like this should be handled. This thread sounds like a very good start :-) Shameless plug: for more general interactions need like this one in the future, you might want to have a look at http://wiki.debian.org/DerivativesFrontDesk Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7 zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/ Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere ti resta John Fante -- V. Caposella .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
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