Membership and packaging management questions

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 07:11:08PM +0100, Marek Habersack wrote:
>   I've been using Ubuntu on my desktop machines exclusively ever since hoary
> and I think it's the highest time for me to relieve the good folks
> maintaining my Debian packages for Ubuntu. There's simply no point in
> doubling the efforts when I can maintain both the Debian and the Ubuntu
> packages at the same time.
>   Regarding the above, I've got two questions:
> 
>     - what is the process for a DD to become an Ubuntu uploader

Hi,

Yes, we certainly welcome Debian developers who want to help out, and in
general people with experience in Debian have no trouble applying for
upload permissions to Ubuntu. We generally like people to work with the
MOTU team a bit anyway (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU) so that they get
the hang of some slightly different processes in Ubuntu.

Once you've done that for a while, these links should help:

  http://www.ubuntu.com/community/processes/newmember
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityCouncilAgenda
  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TechnicalBoardAgenda

The Community Council approve new members (recognising sustained and
significant contributions); the Technical Board approve new maintainers
(uploaders), some of whom are universe-only and some of whom are
unrestricted. Maintainers are generally expected to be members too.
People who've been around in Debian for a while usually have enough
stuff they've done and can point to that they tend to sail through these
checks pretty quickly, if they're willing to contribute to Ubuntu as
well as Debian on a long-term basis.

>     - how do I deal with removing from Ubuntu packages that I requested to
> be removed from Debian?

That normally happens semi-automatically, in much the same way that
binary packages not built from source any more get semi-automatically
removed (i.e. an ftpmaster runs a script every so often which suggests
removals). If a package is being actively harmful in the archive and
there's a particular hurry for it to be removed, talk to James Troup.

(I've just added a section about this to
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeveloperResources, which contains a number of
other useful snippets of information.)

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]