Kubuntu Policies (for council consideration)

[Jonathan Riddell]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 12:35:37PM +0100, Harald Sitter wrote:
> > Allowing informal membership of kubuntu-packagers and kubuntu-ppa is a
> > nice stepping stone to tell people they are valued and trusted
> > contributors before we can give them full -membership or -dev
> > privilages.
> > 
> > (And I still think 6 months is too long for -membership or -dev,
> > building community needs letting people in without too much barrier,
> > one of the aims of Ubuntu was to allow a lower barrier of entry than
> > Debian.)
> 
> So it's a larger ubuntu issue and should be discussed as such.

I don't have the energy to argue for a general ubuntu membership
policy change to let in members with < 6 months experience.  But
compared to KDE it's a long time to ask just to get on Planet ubuntu
and a few other benefits.

> Bringing me back to the original argument that if a person cannot be formally 
> trusted and accepted into one of the existing teams, then everyone must review 
> all new changes in every bzr branch before uploading as otherwise they might 
> be uploading something that is not as good as it ought to be, or at the worst 
> malicious content.

I would hope people to review changes of what they are uploading.

But people can certainly be trusted to commit to bzr and upload to
PPAs before they can be trusted to upload to the main Ubuntu archive.

> ~kubuntu-packagers holds the qt packaging which is also meddled with by ubuntu 
> developers who would rightfully assume that only formally trusted people can 
> commit changes there. However, that would no longer be the case if we add 
> people informally to that team simply because we decide to trust their 
> abilities enough. So we'd then potentially lure !kubuntu members into 
> uploading potentially bad or malicious content because they did not know that 
> we have a lax policy on who gets to change the official packaging branches.

Again they should review what they are uploading.  But anyone given
access to ~kubuntu-packagers who didn't know about qt packaging and
committed to qt packaging would not have access for very long.

> And that is why neither kubuntu-packagers nor kubuntu-ppa should be directly 
> joined. We have trust validation processes in place (becoming kubuntu-dev or 
> kubuntu-member), if the time barriers to join those are too long, then a 
> resolution/exception should be sought in ubuntu at large, not work around the 
> perhaps ludicrous barrier by allowing people to sneak in changes even though 
> they really shouldn't be able to sneak in anything anywhere.

I still strongly disagree, I think we should have a stepping stone to
being able to upload to the Ubuntu archive and we should give people
access where they have shown they are competant and know their own
limits.  In the case of Scarlett (sorry to use you as an example)
she's rapidly learning the important points of library packaging so I
hope to not have to review her changes soon and just let her upload to
the PPA.  Currently she has to wait around until I find time to review
which blocks her and takes time from me.  How would you handle her
situation under your proposal?

Jonathan