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

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 24/01/06 at 16:14 +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> 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. 

What I mean is that "some" Debian maintainers don't deal with all bugs
"promptly". It sometimes takes more than a month to receive feedback on
a severity: wishlist or minor bug. I don't think it is really a problem
(we are all volunteers, yada yada yada). But it would be a problem in
the case of working closely with the DCT.

> > 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 problem here is that you are discussing policy ("are expected to")
while I would like to discuss implementable stuff. Having a page
somewhere saying "Ubuntu developers are expected to file bugs in the
Debian BTS for every they fix which could also apply to Debian" would be
useless if not enforced.

> 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.

The worst part of it is happens when MOTUs have to merge the two
packages (newversion-1 from debian and newversion-0ubuntu1 from ubuntu).
I don't like this situation, and would prefer it to be avoided as often
as possible. But some Debian maintainers have proven to be unresponsive
regarding new upstream versions, so Ubuntu devs don't always have the
choice.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
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