Strawman: eliminating debdiffs

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 02:31:32PM +0100, James Westby wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 13:59 +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> >   * Sometimes people send a perfectly good patch in an Ubuntu bug
> >     report and then somebody says "in order to get this included you
> >     should attach a debdiff instead". This is *a complete and utter
> >     waste of time*. A debdiff is just a kind of patch and any Ubuntu
> >     developer who can't figure out how to apply some slightly
> >     differently-formatted patch in a matter of seconds shouldn't be
> >     an Ubuntu developer. What bug triage processes recommend that
> >     people say this and how can we get them fixed? I know people who
> >     are perfectly competent developers who think we're mired in
> >     useless bureaucracy due to this and have been put off
> >     contributing.
> 
> There is a mention at
> 
>   https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Responses
> 
> (can't link directly due to Moin's strange anchor names). It has been
> changed to suggest that a debdiff may help things along, but it is
> not a requirement.

OK. Can I suggest that we should change that to something like the
following:

  == Patch that does not seem to be getting any attention ==

  Thanks for your proposed fix. If you feel that nobody is taking care
  of this package and would like to help to do so yourself, then you may
  wish to prepare a source package including this fix and follow
  http://wiki.ubuntu.com/SponsorshipProcess to have it included in
  Ubuntu.

This restricts this request to where it's actually useful rather than to
essentially all patches not in debdiff format, it talks about the
process rather than about the mechanism, and it explains a little more
about the end goal of getting involved in the sponsorship process.

Daniel, I suspect this was your text. Comments?

> I think the application process should ask for applicants to present
> what they think are the best examples of their work. Those that were
> particularly tricky, those that required an in-depth understanding
> of things like the upgrade process, those where they worked well
> with others to come to a good solution.

Yes; this would be much better both for us and for the applicant than
looking through +packages.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]