Re: Proposal for collaborative maintenance of packages
On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 19:12 -0200, Guilherme de S. Pastore wrote:
> Even then, do you think you are ready to upload a package to the Debian
> archive?
Mine, yes. I know more about it than anyone else, I know
what the issues are and have a sponsor to ask for help,
I'm registered on debian-mentors list so I can ask for
help there, and I'm already the uploader for it in another
packaging system.
Particularly if the uploads I made went to a repository
for such MUP packages, and needed a DD to move it on -- at least
I would have more confidence everything was working when asking
for it to be moved on, and, feel less hassled about asking
for that to be done, since I'd have the lintian/autobuilder
output to verify it was clean -- at least as seen by
automated tools.
Right now, however, when I release an upstream tarball,
there is a whole bunch of work for the maintainer/DD to
do .. the set of files in the package may have changed,
the dependencies may have changed, the documentation
set may have changed. This is true for any package
of course .. but this is 150KLOC of source which is
not built in 'conventional' ways -- it uses a literate
programming tool and Python scripts, and the bulk
of the code is in an advanced programming language
(including some in itself :)
> Would you trust Debian enough to install it on your machine and
> any other machine that may require any degree of trust if there were
> people with upload privileges that have not had their skills checked to
> a bare minimum?
No.
Would you not trust my DD to check *my* skills at maintaining
a few lines of Debian packaging script which wraps
the package of which I'm the upstream author?
Given that my upload only went into a MUP repo .. and still
needed the DD to move it on?
> People usually maintain the packages they have interest in, and as many
> of those as they want. If it is not maintaining but uploading for other
> people, as people have told you before, you cannot expect that there is
> someone (or many people, as your suggestion requires) willing to do only
> the uninteresting job.
I don't. But I have to admit -- pressing the buttons to
upload something doesn't sound like an interesting job:
maybe I'm presuming too much.
> I have not tried to come
> up with some serious numbers, but I assume that if every developer
> sponsored two packages, we would cover all the current sponsorees and
> probably many more.
Interesting. That certainly isn't the case for the main software
tool I use as a developer.
--
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net
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