perl maintenance help

[Niko Tyni]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:14:23PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 11:39:13PM +0200, Niko Tyni wrote:
> 
> > Help with perl maintenance would naturally be very welcome. Eugene has
> > helped out a lot, and we'd love to have more active comaintainers.
 
> Not sure how much time I'll have to give, but I'm certainly prepared
> to give it a go. Point the way!

Great, thanks! I've added you to the Alioth project so you should have
commit access to the git repository soon. Cc'ing the perl-maintainers
list.

Aside from preparing the upcoming 5.12.0, a quick braindump of things that
need help:

- BTS:
  * categorizing and triaging bugs
    + I think usertags could help here, we just need a sensible list
  * closing invalid bugs
    + Eugene has done a lot of this already, but I think there are still
      plenty left
  * forwarding triaged bugs upstream if they're present on unmodified bleadperl
    + we could definitely do better here; I'm personally erring 
      much too often on the side of "I'll write a patch first"
      and then forgetting about it
    + OTOH upstream has explicitly stated that documentation bugs
      should come with patches
  * fixing the `real' Debian-specific bugs 
    + this is often hard because perl is such a core package in Debian
      and needs to change conservatively
    + examples: #495394, #186778, #230308, #310995
- Debian-specific patches (debian/patches/debian/*)
  * document what they do, why they are needed etc.
    + possibly create one `divergence bug' per patch in the BTS to track this?
  * ideally, find a way to drop them or integrate them upstream
    + upstream has quite high standards so quick hacks usually don't
      make it in
    + ongoing work on dropping one: #568748
- Alioth infrastructure:
  * sending git commits to the PTS
  * mailing list setup, spam filtering, moderation
  * project web pages and other documentation
    + put this list as a TODO page somewhere? :)
- general peer review
  * getting git commits via mail should help here

Sorry about being so terse, I'm really tired and just trying to get this
out before falling asleep. I'm certainly happy to go into more detail
whereever needed (but it may take me a few days).
-- 
Niko