[Utnubu-discuss] Collaboration between Ubuntu and Debian on the Ubuntu side: a proposal

Hamish Moffatt hamish at debian.org
Tue Jan 24 05:14:41 UTC 2006


On Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 05:13:11PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > In my mind, the DCT is like teamwork between some Debian maintainers and
> > an Ubuntu team. It has to be based on a trust relationship: the debian
> > maintainer must react as promptly as possible to bugs submitted by the
> > DCT. I don't think that the DCT members (or even DDs members of the DCT,
> > with their DCT hat on) should interact with the normal Debian
> > development (reporting MIA maintainers for example) :
> > - A maintainer not responding to a bug report after a month would be
> >   totally inappropriate when working with the DCT.
> 
> Sure.
> 
> > - But it is OK for normal Debian work.
> 
> No it's not "OK" for normal Debian work. A maintainer is expected to react
> to bugs and to classify them. "No response" is a bad behaviour.

Yes, that's true. 

> As such, if a maintainer doesn't respond to bugs from DCT, I believe that
> DD within DCT certainly could/should NMU the package. :-)

NMU is for more serious bugs only though. It's not a simple problem.

I think some additional requirements of the MOTUs are also needed;
while the DCT page describes "mode 1" being Ubuntu developers submitting
to the Debian BTS on a volunteer basis, Debian developers are already
expected to do better than that when working with their upstream.
I think more needs to be expected of the MOTUs.

The Wiki page talks about MOTUs being understaffed and very busy. In my
experience some of this could be reduced by passing more things on to
Debian and allowing them to filter through to Ubuntu in time, rather 
than changing them in Ubuntu.

For example, Ubuntu contained (until recently) a newer upstream version
of package xastir than Debian, which was requested by a Ubuntu user.
I would have been reasonably happy to make that change in Debian and
thus this would have meant Ubuntu developers did not need to do anything
expect pass on the request in the form of a bug report. Admittedly it
would only be a few minutes work to prepare the new version, but if you
do that on a few hundred packages it adds up.

cheers
Hamish
-- 
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish at debian.org> <hamish at cloud.net.au>



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