MOTU application for Alessio Treglia (quadrispro)

[James Westby]

On Sun, 2009-01-18 at 11:50 +0100, Devid Antonio Filoni wrote:
> +1 from me. I sponsored a lot of his uploads and they were quite good.
>  Please note that Alessio also attaches on bugs the buildlogs which
> means that all attached debdiff are tested. I'm sure Alessio will be a
> great MOTU.

Hi all,

This is the second time that the fact that Alessio attaches build logs 
to his sponsorship requests has been mentioned as a plus point. Yes, it
is good, but as we rebuild everything anyway it's easy to see when
someone hasn't. I'd look for other things to see whether someone is
ready to be a MOTU.

Alessio approached me to advocate his application, and I said that he
wasn't quite at the point yet where I would be happy to, but he is
well on the way. I was going to leave it at that and see if some of
my fellow MOTUs felt confident enough in his work to advocate his.
However, I have seen a couple of things since which illustrate why I
think he is not quite ready yet.

The first was https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/317682. There was 
absolutely nothing wrong with the merge as far as I could see. However,
I asked some questions when I saw it. For instance, do we need to
remove that documentation in Ubuntu? Would it be better to minimise
the diff to Debian, or keep the documentation for our users? Is it
worth spending time on merging that change?

The second was https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/318102. One of the
changes that was carried over here was:

  - Added /usr/share/activities/ to the search path to work around issue
    with the packaging of the activities. This can be dropped when
    the activities are fixed.

This was added in the Intrepid cycle so that we could fix a very serious
problem with the sugar packages with one upload instead of an upload of
each activity. However, as it says it doesn't need to be carried for 
ever. I haven't checked to see if the activities are still broken, but
I would like to know whether Alessio did.

My concern is with the lack of commentary on Alessio's sponsor requests.
Without that I find it hard to judge Alessio's decision making, which I
feel to be one of the most important aspects about a MOTU.

Some may be disappointed that I told Alessio I didn't think he had been
at this "long enough" for me to advocate him, but this is exactly why.
Without commentary that I can use to get an insight in to his decision
making process I feel all I can do is watch things over time until I
am comfortable that he tends to make the right decisions. And there is
no way I give an estimate of how long that will take.

I do not wish to block Alessio's application, but I wanted to outline
my concerns, and to ask the advocates how they came to trust Alessio's
decision making? I'm sure Alessio will be good MOTU, but I'm not quite
sure he is ready to not have his decisions checked before upload. I'm
quite willing to be told I am wrong though.

Alessio, perhaps you could could tell us a bit about the sugar upload.
Did you check the activities to see if they were fixed? If not, how 
would you go about doing that?

Thanks,

James