[Desktop13.04-Topic]

[Andrew Starr-Bochicchio]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 7:11 PM, Chris Wilson <notgary at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I've registered a blueprint here regarding the speed of the review process
> for paper cut patches.
>
> One of things about the paper cuts project is that most of the people
> contributing to it won't have upload rights to either the Ubuntu, Gnome or
> Debian archives, meaning they're going to need people to upload patches on
> their behalf, and getting the attention of archive maintainers has proven
> problematic in the past.
>
> I'm looking for people in Ubuntu that would be able to expedite the approval
> process for new patches in these projects. With Ubuntu and Gnome, that's
> having someone with upload rights giving special attention to the bug
> reports that are identified as having patches ready for review. With Debian,
> this may be slightly harder since each package there has a single maintainer
> so I'm not sure how to proceed there and ideas would be welcome.
>
> What thoughts do people have on this?

In general, I believe the sponsorship process [1] works reasonably
well. Where I've seen issues with paper cuts more specifically is
around design decisions. As a sponsor (though only of universe
packages), it is usually very clear if a patch is appropriate or not.
Of course, the main question is does the patch actually fix the bug.
This can be tested by an individual developer. But when the patch is
aiming to address a design issue it is not as clear, especially when
it proposes to diverge from upstream behaviour. This seems to be the
main issue with sponsoring paper cut patches.

I'm reluctant to suggest adding another layer of bureaucracy, but
especially for applications in the default install (which is what
paper cuts target) it might make sense to have some sort of design
review queue. Once a change gets an ACK from the design team, it could
then proceed to be sponsored as usual. Just brainstorming here...

Either way, you probably want to ping dholbach about this. I haven't
seen it registered yet, but he usually registers a sponsorship process
health-check session.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SponsorshipProcess

Thanks!

- Andrew Starr-Bochicchio