Packaging branches which are not owned by ubuntu-dev

[Siegfried-Angel]

Hi,

There are (and I guess in the future this will be more frequent)
branches for Ubuntu packaging which are not owned by ubuntu-dev. As an
example, the Mythbuntu team maintains several mythbuntu- packages, as
you can see on https://code.launchpad.net/mythbuntu; I'll continue
referencing this case in the remaining part of this e-mail.

This raises the problem that Ubuntu Developers can't commit to those
branches, which I want to solve by starting this thread. The possible
solutions I can think of are the following ones:

1. Avoiding the issue altogether by letting ubuntu-dev own the
branches, but this is inconvenient for the Mythbuntu team.

2. Let ubuntu-dev be a member of mythbuntu, so that all MOTUs and Core
Developers can commit to those branches. This seems to be the best
solution, IMHO, but unfortunately it generates unwanted mails to all
developers; more on this later on this mail.

3. Having all branches twice, one owned by mythbuntu and one by
ubuntu-dev, and each time you want to change one merge with the branch
owned by the other group before.

4. Just upload to Ubuntu and don't worry about the branch. This is
obviously not the ideal solution.

5. Some other possibility I have forgotten?

Coming back to option two:

The biggest problem with that approach is that if mythbuntu has no
"contact address" the bugmail is send to all team members, bug this
can be easily solved by creating another team
(ubuntu-dev-without-bugmail, which would have a "contact address"), of
which ubuntu-dev would be a member, and adding that team to mythbuntu.
This way, all the bugmail is send to ubuntu-dev-without-bugmail's
contact address instead of to the members of ubuntu-dev.

Thinking that this is the only issue, we (actually, me, after
suggesting it to superm1) followed this approach, and at the moment
I'm writing this any ubuntu-dev member can commit to the branches
owned by mythbuntu. I want to apologize for doing this without asking
here first, especially as there is another little problem of which we
hadn't thought: the bugmail gets caught, but not other messages
related to the team (such as the creation of new mailing lists).

So, approach 2 (with the workaround explained above) has the following issues:
 - All ubuntu-dev members get mythbuntu related notifications, except
for the bugmail (so those aren't supposed to be a lot of mails).
 - All ubuntu-dev members have the mythbuntu icon on their Launchpad profile.

Having said this, lets the debate start...

I also want to ask if the ubuntu-dev-without-bugmail team should be
removed as a member of mythbuntu now (loosing the possibility to
commit to mythbuntu branches, but avoiding more possible emails
related to it), or wait until there's some decision on how to do this
and remove it then (if option 2 was not chosen).

Kind regards,

-- 
Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals (RainCT)
Ubuntu Developer. Debian Contributor.