requesting for changes to be sent to debian before sponsoring an upload

[Sebastien Bacher]

Hello everybody,

Everybody will agree that sending changes to Debian is good thing, we
still have many packages that could be in sync but are not though

One example from today's upload:

" libofx (1:0.9.0-2.2ubuntu1) intrepid; urgency=low
 .
   * Merge from debian unstable, remaining changes (LP: #238266):
     - Rebuild with libcurl4-gnutls (change build-depends from
       libcurl3-gnutls-dev to libcurl4-gnutls-dev).
     - debian/control: Change Maintainer to XSBC-Original-Maintainer."

I don't want to point anybody there, but that's typically the sort of
change which should have been sent directly to Debian so we could have
this package in sync again

The issue is partially an educational one and that's why I would like to
suggest to change the sponsoring policy to request to have changes which
make sense for Debian sent to the bts (and bonus points if you send
those upstream and tag the distribution patches too) before sponsoring
an upload, this way we don't create delta and contributors learn that
sending changes to debian and upstream is useful

What do other people think about the idea?


Other small note about sponsoring, is there any document or tool which
contributors are user to send sponsoring request for the merges they do?

The title should be updated to reflect that the work has been done and
that sponsoring is required because the current title doesn't really
suggest that and can be confusing


Sebastien Bacher