[Reportbug-maint] Interested in joining the reportbug team

[Sandro Tosi]

Hello,

On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 9:20 PM, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org> wrote:
> Hi reportbug maintainers!
>
> I'm a DD, and I'm interested in possibly helping work on reportbug. In the

i guess the usual way to start contributing is by looking at some bugs
and provide patches to them (but see at the bottom of this email)

> long run, I'm interested in becoming a trusted-enough maintainer of
> reportbug to be able to have push access and the ability to upload the
> package, although I know that may be a long road (months? years?).
>
> My personal motivation is that I have been reporting bugs in Debian for a
> long time, and I personally care a lot that newcomers to Debian have a good
> experience, and today I reported a bug in Debian and accidentally managed to
> do it incorrectly (MTA confusion), despite many years of experience with
> reportbug, and I figure the best thing to do in response is to commit to
> spending time improving this very widely-used package.
>
> Before beginning down that road, I thought I would say hello on this list,
> and also ask if you're interested in more contributors/eventual-maintainers!
> Given the fact that there are some bugs with patches at
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=reportbug;dist=unstable ,
> it seems that it would be useful to have more co-maintainers of the package
> so that there is more bandwidth available to review patches. Is that an
> accurate assessment?

hm it's not really the case we are looking for new maintainers: most
of those patches are just bugs wrongly tagged, or sometihng that could
not be merged anyway.

>
> The first thing I will probably do is find a few bugs on
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=reportbug;dist=unstable
> and submit refreshed patches for them, such as:
>
> - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=717563
>
> - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=431402
>
> - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=664213
>
> I'm also curious what kind of timeframe to expect patch review. I ask
> because my ability to work on Debian tasks is at its highest right now,
> while I'm traveling during/after Debconf, and then decreases when I get back
> to normal life/work, and then will increase and decrease over time. So
> therefore if I submit some patches in the next 1-2 days, it'd be very
> helpful to get review/merge on them within 1-2 days so that I can revise
> them and resubmit in a prompt fashion.
>
> We can't always get what we want, and so if very prompt patch review is not
> possible, that is OK! Just let me know.

well, as you might guess, asking right now for a 1-2 days turnaround,
with no advance notice, is rather unreasonable: i dont share your
schedule, and i cannot change my previous commitments to accommodate
such request.

>
> If there are specific tasks that you would find useful from me as a new
> contributor, I hope to hear about them so I can focus on them!

if you would like to contribute to reportbug, the major thing that
really needs attention is the GTK+ UI: i dont use it, it's been
contributed by an external developer who promised to maintain it and
then lost interest. Users seem to like it so it's been kept alive, but
it would need someone to care for it.

I'm in the process of porting reportbug to py3k so you might also
consider holding your efforts at a later time, when this conversion is
over.

Regards,

-- 
Sandro "morph" Tosi
My website: http://sandrotosi.me/
Me at Debian: http://wiki.debian.org/SandroTosi
G+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SandroTosi