MOTU Application for Fabien Tassin (fta)

Fabien Tassin fta at sofaraway.org
Sat Aug 30 17:50:51 BST 2008


Hi,

According to Stefan Potyra:
> 
> On Thursday 28 August 2008 00:23:10 Fabien Tassin wrote:
> > We sometimes receive contributions from the community as debdiffs posted
> > in bugs. I don't remember anyone outside of the team proposing branch
> > merges or reviews (with the noticable exception of extensions).
> > I would love to see MOTUs contribute here, especially when we are lagging
> > behind. A granted merge could serve as an ACK.
> >
> [..]
> > My point is that packages with a specific home should be handled by
> > the corresponding team, knowing that contributions are always welcome.
> >
> 
> I guess that's not exactly clear yet to me: One problem with bzr as home for 
> packages, that is not limited to the mozilla team, is that it can go out of 
> sync with what's actually in the archive, e.g. if a MOTU would sponsor a 
> debdiff. I guess partly due to this, and due to the fact that I wouldn't know 
> what the right policy for uploads in regards to mozilla packages is, I was 
> reluctant to not sponsor anything in this area. So what do you think is the 
> right procedure in this case?

This is all about following the workflow of the specific team. Anyone willing
to contribute to a package owned by a team should at least take the time
to ask the team about their workflow. I think most teams have a page on
the wiki describing just that. If not, it's a problem that should be fixed.
The very minimum would be to look for a Vcs-* tag in the control file and
if there is, never sponsor a debdiff without talking to the branch owners
first, otherwise, like you said, it will go out of sync and make further
maintenance difficult. Of course, if there's no Vcs-* tag, but the package
is maintained in a branch, there's no way to know so it's ok.

Don't mis-interpret me, I'm not trying to make the life harder for
contributors, I'm just trying to explain why we sometimes have to merge
debdiffs into larger releases because people were not aware of our workflow.
I understand that this could be frustrating so it should be avoided as much
as possible. I don't think it's only about the Mozilla team.

I'm hoping a lot from the Distributed Development project (udd) we've
discussed at the last UDS in Pragues. Unfortunatly, it looks staled
at the moment. Too bad.

/Fabien



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