Re: Are Martin and Sam's platforms equivalent?

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Sean Whitton writes ("Re: Are Martin and Sam's platforms equivalent?"):
> On Fri 29 Mar 2019 at 04:43PM +02, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > 2. Package sponsorship
...
> > There are too few people reviewing packages at sponsorship-requests,
> > but proper and timely reviews would be very important both for not
> > frustrating new contributors and ensuring that new contributors
> > are learning to do high-quality packaging.

I hesitate to bang this drum again, but this would be a great place to
think about how we can use git more.

Ideally, our default sponsorship workflow would *not involve source
packages or orig tarballs at all*.

> The question is whether those processes could be changed such that the
> manpower problem would be less keenly felt.  I cannot myself see any way
> to achieve that -- there are tooling issues but improving the relevant
> tools would not significantly speed either queue.

Whenever I do sponsorship I find the task of consuming the bits I have
been provided by my sponsee far outweighs the task of checking what
they have done to the package.

This is seriously exacerbated by the additional friction which occurs
if I have any comment on the package which results in a respin.

If sponsorship was as simple as
    git debsponsor clone <package>
    cd <package>
    git diff dgit/dgit/sid # or maybe git diff upstream/stable-4.12
    dgit push-source
then (i) I would want to do much more sponsorship (ii) my sponsees
would get the kind of timely service I can provide for `oh this is a
5 min job' type of task, rather than what I can provide for `this
might take half an hour or it might take two hours'.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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