Making it easier for people to work with upstreams

[Daniel Holbach]

Hello everybody,

Am Montag, den 11.01.2010, 17:25 +0100 schrieb Sense Hofstede:
> It makes no sense to do almost the same thing twice. Maybe we should
> add some ideas of Adopt-a-Pacakge to the Upstream Contact principle
> and make it a team. Something like a PackageFocusGroup or
> ApplicationAdopters. That team could have people watching the patches,
> people working on integrating its development in the Ubuntu release
> cycle, possibly the person or persons packaging the application, a
> group of people triaging bug reports, someone upstream can call if
> they want to call Ubuntu and who noitifies upstream of Ubuntu plans
> affecting upstream, and someone who keeps everything organised on the
> wiki and between people.
> People could do multiple tasks or one task or parts of multiple tasks,
> just what they'd like to do.

When we started thinking of "Adopt an Upstream" it was the name of an
initiative. It's not meant to replace anything.

The discussion:

 - what is confusing in our processes today
 - what we need to clarify in terms of documentation
 - how interested people find out about the possibilities
 - how we learn from each other and form best practices

to me is much more important than the name of the group people who are
part of the initiative or the name of the initiative itself.

We want to revisit how people who are passionate about a certain piece
of software can be most useful, both to Ubuntu and upstream. This was
never meant to replace anything or shut-down any other initiative.



> It would be impossible to have large teams for all packages, something
> like Guake doesn't need a squad full of specialists to keep it
> healthy, but packages like X.org and the Linux kernel could benefit
> greatly from it. GNOME could be sliced into different pieces, but
> maybe it would also be good to keep things like the core libraries in
> one team.

I'm sure this will happen naturally. Interested new people will flock to
either pieces of software they are interested in or a list of things
that are advertised as TODO.

There are folks who are interested in getting the masses of bugs under
control, others like to fix bugs with small patches, others want to
track work that's going on upstream and integrate it in Ubuntu and some
might want to do all of this. It'd be nice if those people find each
other easily, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to plan those teams
first thing now.

What I do think we should make clear though is that there is no "big
maintainer lock" and there's nobody who handles one project exclusively
and that we want to collaborate as good as we can.

Have a great day,
 Daniel