Request for PPU to Firefox and Membership on Ubuntu Mozilla Daily Build Team and Mozilla Team

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

Hello,

On 20 January 2015 at 19:57, Benjamin Kerensa <bkerensa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am writing to request PPU to Firefox and Membership on Ubuntu Mozilla
> Daily Build Team and Mozilla Team. I have been a contributor
> to Ubuntu for some years and am currently and Ubuntu Contributing Developer.
> Although most of my contributions these days
> are upstream in Firefox as a member of the Firefox Release Management Team
> and release owner for Firefox ESR and Nightly
> I am very concerned about the current state of Firefox Nightly builds which
> are not being frequently and consistently updated.
>
> Myself and another Mozilla contributor (also a Ubuntu Core Dev) have several
> times tried to get things transitioned to us but the current maintainer is
> very unresponsive due to his new full time role with Canonical. We also have
> Ubuntu users pretty regularly complaining about the inconsistent updating of
> Firefox Nightly in Ubuntu through our support channels and on social media
> which reflects poorly on both Mozilla and Ubuntu.
>
> That being said as a upstream contributor who already plays an integral role
> in releasing Firefox to downstream (Ubuntu) and our users
> and with the packaging experience I have I am asking for these memberships
> and PPU so that myself and that other contributor
> can step in and tag team Firefox in Ubuntu and make the experience better
> for the users.
>
>

Ubuntu Developer Membership Board is only concerned with the Ubuntu
Project and uploads into the Ubuntu Archive.

Nightly / beta / unstable builds of Mozilla products do not typically
get uploaded into Ubuntu Archive. But rather stable releases.

Firefox and Thunderbird have a special status, as they have approved
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates/MicroReleaseExceptions by
the Technical Board, which as far as I understand has extended
permissions in how it's packaged given that new major upstream
releases are permitted to be uploaded as security / updates.

Looking at the current state of the archive, firefox browser seems to
be up to date - that is version 35 is available across all releases
with active Desktop support - Precise, Trusty, Utopic and Vivid.

Since the Micro Release Exception has been granted, Mozilla products
have been up to date and available on all Ubuntu releases. Thus
negating past / acient benefits of daily PPAs.

As Stephane has already pointed out DMB has no control over
any/arbitrary PPAs on Launchpad (i.e. ~ubuntu-mozilla-daily or
~ubuntu-mozilla). And if your sole purpose to gain access to them,
gaining PPU upload rights for firefox/thunderbird packages in the
Ubuntu Archive will not achieve that.

If none the less, you wish to apply for upload permissions for
firefox/thunderbird - there are two avenues for that (launchpad team
name in brackets to avoid any ambiguity):

* Ubuntu Core Developer status (~ubuntu-core-dev)

* Ubuntu Mozilla Uploaders PPU / packageset uploaders team
(~ubuntu-mozilla-uploaders)

To send a correct application for either of those, please see the wiki.

As a guidance from myself alone, given that firefox/thunderbird are
actively maintained in Ubuntu, and are up to date, and that they have
a high velocity of updates and security releases, I would expect to
see a high coding and packaging expertise from an applicant with a big
history of preparing security updates in Ubuntu first. Similarly, I
expect and hope, that ubuntu-core-devs do exercise caution before
touching packages such as these, I know that I wouldn't.

To be clear, your email was not a properly prepared PPU application,
and thus, at this time, no further action will be performed by DMB.

-- 
Regards,

Dimitri.