[idea] DDPO by mail
Hi,
The goal of this mail is to describe a possible new tool in Debian: DDPO by
mail, and to start discussing its details and implementation.
== Rationale ==
Many maintainers only maintain a few packages, which are in a very good state
most of the time. But often, such maintainers aren't fully aware of what is
happening with their packages. Of course, we could ask maintainers to use their
DDPO page as "start page", but that's not really realistic. :)
== Idea ==
The idea of "DDPO by mail" is to push *useful* information to maintainers
by sending them emails on a regular basis (e.g every two weeks).
=== Main principles ===
Those mail should be as useful as possible. They should only contain important
information. Examples are:
* information about RC bugs in maintained packages
* information about packages not in testing
There should be one mail per maintainer, not one mail per package (to avoid
flooding the maintainers' mailboxes). So it's "DDPO by mail", not "PTS by
mail".
Everything should be configurable (using a mail interface). It should be
possible to "ignore" a problem for a specific package, ideally setting a date
until when it will be ignored. For example, I should be able to say: "I don't
want to be warned about this package not being in testing before 2007-08-01."
or "I'd like to ignore bug #nnnnnn until 2007-03-01."
Frequency of mails should be configurable too, but a reasonable default setting
should be provided. This default setting could be changed over time (e.g
decreased when the release approaches, so maintainers get more responsive).
Maintainers should be subscribed by default, but it should be really easy to
unsubscribe.
DDPObyMail should also report about co-maintained packages by default, but that
should be configurable.
=== Implementation ===
==== Sources of data ====
* list of maintainers with their maintained and co-maintained packages: there's
such a list in http://qa.debian.org/data/ddpo/results/ddpo_maintainers, but
this source of info might be removed soon, so it might be necessary to rewrite
something from scratch.
* version in testing and unstable of each package: again, there's a list in
http://qa.debian.org/data/ddpo/results/ddpo_packages
* bugs for each package: that's probably the most tricky part. Is there a
datafile with that information somewhere ? Basically, what would be needed is,
for each package, a list of bug numbers that are still "open" (so we probably
need to understand version tracking). And for each bug, we need its title and
its severity, at least. That's maybe something that we should implement as a
mole DB...
==== Mail interface ====
is there some generic code already available to build a mail interface similar
to the one in the PTS or in the BTS ?
==== Manpower ====
Who is interested in working on that ? I am, but I probably won't have time
before Debconf. If nobody has time to dedicate to this in the near future, we
can still figure out all the details, and work on that in Edimburg.
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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