Processing your MOTU application via email

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

On Thu, 2011-04-14 at 14:15 +0100, Iain Lane wrote: 
> Hi,
> 
> The DMB has had problems achieving quorum in the past few weeks. This
> has resulted in a backlog of applications to be heard.
> 
> Given that, we'd like to invite you to have your application processed
> by email. We'll have a 'questioning' period for at most 1 week, and
> then voting for 2-3 days thereafter.
> 
> If you'd rather be processed on IRC, let us know.
> 
> Initial questions
> 
>    - I see you've collaborated with pkg-xorg. Can you let us know how
>      that's going? Do you have any advice for how Ubuntu teams can best
>      organise themselves to collaborate and do work with/in Debian.

The collaboration with pkg-xorg is going quite well.  Unlike pkg-cli-*,
we've got quite a lot of long-lived divergence from Debian in the X
packages.  Some of that is unavoidable - there's still a different
nouveau kernel ABI in Ubuntu & Debian, for example.  Despite the diff, I
think the collaboration is going well.  A fair amount of our work
happens first in Debian, and I think we're both being useful for them
and getting useful work from them.

For other Ubuntu teams, then if there's a Debian team organised around a
similar set of packages, then get involved with them.  My experiences
with both pkg-cli-* and pkg-xorg have been great, and my experiences
with packages *not* team-maintained have been much more mixed.  In the
best case, like pkg-cli-*, you can end up pretty much maintaining
everything in Debian and doing all the work only once, but even when
you've got an unavoidable diff it can be useful - and easy - to get what
can be done in Debian done in Debian.

I've not been as successful in dealing with packages outside of
team-maintenance.  It seems that there are an increasing number of
team-maintained packages, though.

> - How well do you think package sets work? Do you see a need for an
>      xorg package set?
> 

To a certain extent I think that package sets solve a Debian problem
more than an Ubuntu problem.  I think we're generally better at dealing
with non-member contributors and contributions than Debian.

I think package sets currently have a bit too high a high barrier to
entry - because we don't have many pre-existing package sets, it seems
that most people need to propose both the creation of a package set and
that they be given access to it.  This is kind of the reverse of
Debian's maintainer-lock, and I think our generalist culture flows over
to discourage this.

If there were strong Ubuntu sub-teams it would make sense to have a
package set for each, and I think the Ubuntu X team would be a good
candidate for a package set.
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