Re: What will improve Debian most?
On Tue, 24 Mar 2009, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Over the next twelve months, what single development/activity/project
> is going to improve Debian's value the most? By how much? How will
> you be involved?
Having such a discussion is really interesting, I would not limit it
to -vote and DPL candidates. We should re-raise the topic on -devel and
let all contributors share their big plans for the next year. Going
further we could even have an IdeaTorrent setup (à la
brainstorm.ubuntu.com) where we could all register our
projects/ideas/plans for Debian and have other Debian contributors rate
the ideas. (We could also have a variant open to all users)
http://www.ideatorrent.org
My plans/ideas are the following:
- Global switch to new source format 3.0 (quilt) + drive DEP3 to
standardize the meta-information on debian/patches/*
- Goal: uniformize most packages around a single patch management
system. This makes it easier to occasional contributors, they
can help by learning a single patch management system.
- Goal: better collaboration with upstream and other distributions
because all Debian-specific changes are in separate patches that
will be documented in a standard format (lintian warning will require
that). Get rid of undocumented Debian-specific change in .diff.gz.
- dpkg-vendor tool that can be used in source packages
- Goal: facilitate cooperation with derivatives by having a common
source package for multiple distributions
- Offer some official interface in dpkg-dev to drive a package build
within a VCS (source package created from the VCS directly too).
- Goal: making it easier for occasional contributors so that they don't
have to learn another *-buildpackage tool each time that they hack on
another package.
- Create a debian-love desktop application that would handhold users into
becoming new contributors. The user would select "contributions
scenarios" that are of interest for him and when he has some time to
spend on Debian, he would run one of the scenarios suggested by
the application ("translate .po file for package X", "try to reproduce
bug X", "suggest debtags for package X", "add screenshot for
application X") with the help of some wizard-like interface.
It would make use of all the information available locally and on the
net. You can combine the information that application X is used
regularly and the fact that the bug #123 reported against this
application (same version as the user!) is tagged unreproducible to ask
the user to help reproduce the problem. Possibilities are very broad…
- Goal: recruit more contributors, spread knowledge about our processes
in a entertaining way, make bug management more effective (tagging
bugs unreproducible would drive the attention of more users to
increase the chance that someone can reproduce it), etc.
- Drive DEP2 to define a system that allows us to monitor more
effectively and precisely the maintenance status of all packages.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2008/12/msg00046.html
- Goal: ensure we always have up-to-date information on maintenance
status of packages so that new contributors can be redirected where
their help will be welcome, useful and not ignored.
Not sure all of this fit in a single year… I would not mind if someone
else would be interested to create the debian-love application. :)
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Contribuez à Debian et gagnez un cahier de l'admin Debian Lenny :
http://www.ouaza.com/wp/2009/03/02/contribuer-a-debian-gagner-un-livre/
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