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

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 24/01/06 at 19:44 +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:20:59AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > On 24/01/06 at 16:14 +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > > 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.
> 
> OK, true.
> 
> I see the wiki page has been revised. I like the ideas there now- DCT
> being a team on the Ubuntu side who will establish better communication
> with developers who are willing to commit to being responsive in return.
> 
> I think this is reasonable and am happy to commit to that with regard to
> my packages. However I reserve the right to disagree with requested
> changes AND this doesn't mean I welcome NMUs to implement this.
> Is that acceptable?

I added a note to the wiki page saying :

  Note that you don't have to accept all changes proposed by the DCT,
  but it means that you have to explain in the BTS why you think that a
  specific change isn't of interest to Debian.

I didn't mention NMU not to scare maintainers. It's not the goal of the
team to NMU debian package, but some members of the DCT might be Debian
maintainers and feel that a bug is grave enough to justify an NMU.
However, there's no difference with the normal debian policy regarding
NMU there.

> > > 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.
> 
> Understood, although there was no attempt to contact me in this case. I
> would certainly have considered the request.

Again, I *personally* think that it would be better if MOTUs filed bugs
in the BTS in such cases. But it is not the current policy inside MOTU.

> I imagine that you might need to maintain a blacklist of unresponsive
> maintainers but would prefer that to a whitelist.

I would prefer to be positive about this and whitelist Debian
maintainers though the DCT. But maintaining a blacklist could be a
possibility too.

I've added a ""Test" Debian maintainers" section to
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DCT . For now, we still have to recruit a few
Ubuntu devs and get the infrastructure up and running.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas at lucas-nussbaum.net   http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
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