OT - Re: [Utnubu-discuss] porting pyalsaaudio from Utnubu

[Jeroen van Wolffelaar]

On Sat, Nov 19, 2005 at 04:07:20PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> Very interesting.  I am CCing Jeroen, we talked about sponsoring
> frameworks and whether to use REVU some time ago, so maybe he can
> comment on this and what would be ideally needed from Debian's POV.

Thanks, Michael.

> On Sat, Nov 19, 2005 at 03:29:23PM +0100, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> > On 11/19/05, Michael Banck <mbanck at debian.org> wrote:
> > > If you feel there is communication overhead in the way sponsoring is
> > > usually handled in Debian, why don't you use REVU for that as well?
> > >
> > > Or, to rephrase the question in a more general way: Do you think REVU
> > > would be useful for Debian as well, and if so, would you be interested
> > > in integrating it?
> > 
> > I do think it would be useful for debian as well, but the current
> > implementation has some really bad issues. I'm currently working on
> > the next version, sometimes called REVU2, which will be much more
> > maintainable and usable. With that version, I would really be
> > interested in adapting it for debian and integrating into standard
> > debian sponsoring procedures.

It's been a few months since I discussed about this, I guess, well,
according to my logs, it was august 7th. I can mail logs of the
discussion to those interested, just mail me (unfortunately channel
policy doesn't allow me to put up the log somewhere public).

The discussion was happening about an initiative on the Debian -qa to
put all orphaned packages in one svn repository to easy QA maintainance,
but later it also went about REVU etc.

My main suggestion regarding implementing something like REVU in Debian
would be: KISS. Keep it simple. There are a *lot* of excellent resources
on numerous places already in Debian, and what is lacking and would be
most useful addition in the area of sponsoring is integration of all
these services. Basicly, to have one central place to coordinate
sponsoring most usefully, keeping in mind that (at least for the
forseeable future) not everybody will use it. You'll also notice that if
instead of intending to replace services X, Y and Z, leveriging them,
introduction and adoption will go much easier.

So far the high level talk, now a bit more concrete:

Currently, there is no useful and used place where sponsors and
sponsorees can usefully encounter eachother. RFS's on mailinglists have
a limited effect (espcially because updates are not very well possible),
and in practice, I get the feeling that having a fixed sponsor and
simply badgering for sponsors in IRC works much better.

The ideal system in my eyes must be very simple to use, provide a way
for the prospective sponsoree to add his package(s), and the interface
must list description, and might also in the future list
lintian/linda/piuparts output, etc. Besides that, the most important
thing would be a sort of status board regarding the checking status of
the package, everybody must be able to comment on certain aspects of the
package, possibly based on the sponsoring checklist by Matthew Palmer,
so that everybody, DD or not, can contribute to checking the package,
and a potential sponsor can based on that, quickly see whether a package
will require a lot of mentoring, or not, and adjust his actions
accordingly.  The ease of use of the interface is crucial, it should
also definitely have a direct link to the source package in question.

Last I looked into revu, my main point-of-improvements were that
comments were difficult to find, and not a la nm.debian.org on the main
page, and that for every single action you needed some gpg key and/or
registration etc. I don't think that's needed at all, the information
revu provides is purely informational anyway.

Anyway, good initiative, and the whole concept of REVU is very nice and
promising. If you have more specific questions/request for comments,
just mail me.

Thanks,
--Jeroen

-- 
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen at wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl