Giving upload rights to non-Ubuntu members

[Iain Lane]

Hi TB,

The Developer Membership Board (DMB) has developed a proposal to allow for the
granting of per-package upload rights to individuals without the (currently
implicit) granting of Ubuntu membership. The intention is to lower the barrier
to entry as we would no longer need to assess against the "significant and
sustained contribution" threshold, which is commonly understood to mean six
months of active participation in the Ubuntu community. We'll be able, for
example, to give greater weight to upstream contributions or to participation
in other distributions (essentially, to concentrate on technical skill).

We don't propose to change any existing memberships, nor to alter MOTU or
core-dev in any way.

The general way this works is as follows (some exceptions come after).
Individuals, when they apply to the DMB for packageset or PPU rights, will be
considered separately for their upload access and for Ubuntu membership (the
latter being optional, and usually not explicitly requested). There will be
some necessary changes to team structure:

  - Create an "~ubuntu-uploaders" team which is a member of bug control and
    similar teams. Direct members are ~ubuntu-dev, uploaders without membership
    and non-membership (see later) packageset teams.
  - Create an "~ubuntu-developer-members" team to be a member of any membership
    related teams (ubuntumembers, ...). Direct members are members who were
    granted membership by the DMB and ~ubuntu-dev.  
  - ~ubuntu-dev is for PPU who also have membership, and membership (again, see
    later) most packageset teams. As now, it's the team which will be polled to
    elections for development governance bodies (DMB & TB). 

Since some packages have a greater impact on Ubuntu users than others, we would
like to keep the membership requirement in certain cases (albeit retaining the
discretion to waive it in exceptional cases; this needn't create onerous
difficulties on the part of applicants as such membership considerations will
in most cases be implicit anyway). These are:

  - Flavor packagesets: since these operate at the project level, we feel it's
    appropriate for these developers to have project membership. For the
    avoidance of doubt, we take flavors to include Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu
    Server here.
  - "Core" packages: since these have a large impact on every Ubuntu user, we
    require uploaders to demonstrate their commitment to the project by
    qualifying for Ubuntu membership. "Core" in this context means the
    packagesets core, desktop-core, xorg, XXX precise list TBD; any packagesets
    which contain packages that intersect with the above; and PPU for any
    package contained in the above.
  
We recognise that the second point above about core packages could be confusing
for applicants as it creates two categories of package with differing
requirements. To help with this, we will maintain a canonical list of such
packagesets and ensure it is appropriately documented. It also implies that we
will need to decide at packageset creation time whether a package should
require membership or not.

We'd like the TB to discuss this proposal, to suggest any amendments you feel
are necessary and to concur with its implementation. If you add it to the
agenda of one of your meetings (probably a decent idea), please let the DMB
know so that we can show up to answer questions and consider amendments.
Otherwise we are fine to deal with it over email.

Thanks, on behalf of the DMB,

-- 
Iain Lane                                  [ iain at orangesquash.org.uk ]
Debian Developer                                   [ laney at debian.org ]
Ubuntu Developer                                   [ laney at ubuntu.com ]
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/attachments/20130722/2fac1109/attachment-0001.pgp>