[App-review-board] ARB queue status

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello,

Am 24.11.2011 20:17, schrieb Allison Randal:
> Trying again on a reply that seemed to go to dev/null this morning...

This one seems to have worked. ;-)


> Thanks for this. Unfortunately I'm not sure the numbers are helpful, as
> they cover a period where we halted reviews waiting on tools, and two
> change overs, first to MyApps+Launchpad, and now to not using Launchpad
> anymore (the activity in the past two weeks has gone into MyApps). The
> MyApps developers are working on building similar statistics into the
> reviewer interface.

That's great news. I'm glad this was thought of very early on and it's
going to be interesting to see how things go over time.


> We just started a "patch pilot"-like schedule, to have reviewers
> clearing the queue each week:
> 
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AppReviewBoard/ReviewShifts
> 
> I had the first shift, and in that time was able to package one app from
> scratch, do a code review on another, get another submitted upstream to
> Debian (which has now been accepted, huzzah!), and comment on a couple
> of others. So, I'm hopeful that we'll catch up pretty quickly this way.

It's great that one package got accepted in Debian! I remember a
discussion at UDS where we wondered if it'd make sense to be more
up-front about the different options which package submitters have
including the impact and expectations. Is this something we'll
document/announce/tell people this cycle?


> And, we've also invited others to help do reviewing and packaging, as
> non-voting participants. I had one person asking about it on IRC during
> my shift, and another emailed me this week. Given your experience
> building up community teams, perhaps you have some suggestions on how to
> organize the non-voting reviewers? i.e. should we create a launchpad
> team for them, sign them up with us for review shifts, etc?

A Launchpad team doesn't hurt. Maybe you can make use of it in the
myapps application at some stage. Personally I would

 - make it clear that others are invited that they can contribute by
   reviewing/testing in the docs, blog about it
 - post to social media when your shift starts and you want others
   to help out
 - explain where the ARB is hanging out, so you can generate some
   discussion (is it #ubuntu-app-devel?)
 - send reports of things that got done
 - ... and if this takes off, it maybe might make sense to have a
   meeting now and then


> You may remember I was concerned at UDS that the submission rate had
> hopped up to 10/week, but wasn't sure if that was a rate that would
> continue, or drop off as the newness of developer.ubuntu.com wore off?
> It has dropped off to about 1-2/week. I hope that rate will continue to
> grow, and I know the two David's have some ideas about how to promote
> the portal to developers, but for now that means we have time to catch
> up, build our regular workflow, and bring in non-voting reviewers.

Yes, catching up is a great idea and from there on you should be able to
better stay on top of things and with a steady pace find out if you need
more resources or need to change things somehow.


> One thing that still remains a difficult issue is installing in /opt. I
> can package an app in an hour, and then spend 3 more getting it to work
> in the non-standard install location. If it takes me that long, I'm sure
> it takes a new developer substantially longer. This might be improved
> with clearer documentation, showing how to solve common problems with
> installation in /opt. Again, I think your experience could be helpful here.
> 
> Another blocker is when packaging an app reveals a bug in a toolkit the
> app is using. The one I packaged last week has a bug in python-pyglet
> with either bamf or the Unity launcher, that is causing the Launcher to
> think it's an application called 'panel' and to show multiple windows,
> even though it only has one. I'm not even sure who to report the bug to.
> You can find the app in my PPA, called 'crabhack':
> 
> https://launchpad.net/~allison/+archive/ppa/+packages
> 
> If it weren't for this bug, we could have voted and approved this app
> this week. It's a pretty little retro scroller game.

It's good to see you are getting a handle on the categories of issues
that block you. Personally I think I would start a bigger discussion
about this on ubuntu-devel at . We should make it much much easier to do
this. If our platform needs to be fixed to look in /opt for certain
things, maybe we should file bugs on all the necessary bits and tag them
with opt-installation or some such to be able to track these issues better.

Have a great day,
 Daniel

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