Strawman: eliminating debdiffs

[Stefan Lesicnik]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 6:20 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
> I think your proposal would actually make the dropped fixes problem worse as
> you've increased the amount of work needed to get a patch to the point where
> is can be considered for sponsorship.  Many people just aren't going to do it.

I agree that we need to get more changes upstream, and agree, if
things do get fixed upstream, we have less work when it comes to
merging in the new development cycle. I think Kees said it - that
there is a huge effort required in learning about upstream and how
they want things done.

I also agree with ScottK about the amount of learning new contributors
need to do. I think it is quite easy to discourage newcomers when
difficult processes exist with no clear way of doing something.  Other
MOTU's also may not be of so much help, because they are unfamiliar
with a particular upstream themselves. With regards to small bugs
about spelling / control file changes etc - I think these are great,
because it gives new contributors a quick easy win to boost confidence
and that feeling of, I can contribute.

I quiet like the Debian adoption of packages, where you would have one
or a group of maintainers closely integrated with upstream who can
facilitate everything around a particular package. I guess we have LP
teams for this...

> In general the scarce resource that we need to conserve in the sponsorship
> process is the sponsor's time.  I think this would use more rather then less
> of it, so I don't think we should do this.  I do, however, completely agree
> with the goal of trying to encourage more upstreaming of changes.

How about the converse, is there anyway we can make upstream work more
closely with us?  Im not sure how, but if upstream could be looking at
our bugs, perhaps pulling in our patches, and fixing upstream, that
would be great.  Could upstream / Ubuntu appoint some kind of liaison
for this?  Maybe we need to find some other ideas to get upstream to
work more with us?

Stefan