Sponsorship Process (Was: Re: Packaging Help)

[Daniel Holbach]

On Mo, 2009-09-28 at 20:43 +0200, Loïc Martin wrote:
> Don't IRC reviewers address a different issue? They're probably good for 
> when you need help in fixing a bug, and for teaching, but how do they 
> deal with the sponsoring issue? Even if they were also a place to ask 
> for it, that's just adding another layer to the sponsoring process, and 
> discriminates against new contributors, who don't use IRC (and asking 
> upstream to find someone to nag on IRC each time there's a patch, a 
> backport or a new release?) 

It's obvious that reviewers will lean towards reviewing stuff they know
well, deal with on a daily basis or are interested in because of some
reason. If you spend a bit of time on reviewing stuff during a week and
have a look at the sponsoring bugs list you naturally overlook stuff. On
the other hand I'd like to point that we manage to review hundreds of
patches per month.

There's a difference between "additional layer in the process" and "an
additional offer". The conclusion that "if you don't know about
reviewers-being-on-IRC, you're screwed" is a bit too quick for my taste:
we are a very distributed team with lots of different interests. You
need to arrange opportunities for people getting together and working on
something together.

If nobody tended to a specific sponsoring bug, it should be easy to turn
up during somebody's hour of review and say "Hey can you please spend a
few minutes on bug X?"


> Where does it helps for people that have 
> been maintaining a package in Ubuntu for a few releases already (only 
> name in the changelog), and suddenly nobody has the time to upload the 
> new version anymore? How long till they give up?

I would expect that developers who took care of a package or a set of
packages for so long apply for per-package upload privileges
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopers#PerPackage


> Actually, nothing in the documentation tells you there's an added step 
> after hitting "Confirmed" and subscribing the relevant sponsors. 
> However, it's often necessary, and since being obnoxious on #ubuntu-motu 
> is counterproductive, you progressively learn to pick up the bugs you 
> think, and not to much, because that way you can leave a few days 
> between asking on the channel.

Which added step are you talking about? Do you mean that being on IRC is
a requirement for getting packages uploaded? There is a lot of people
who don't do it. Sure, sometimes I think "it'd be easier to resolve this
on IRC now", but it's definitely not a requirement and I don't think it
should be.


> Just as an illutration of what I'm talking about, gnucash crashes for a 
> lot of users in Hardy/Intrepid/Jaunty (and Debian :P) because of a 
> faulty patch that got reverted upstream long ago (I only remembered that 
> one because a backport request is on atm). It's a trivial job to revert 
> the patch and ask for an SRU; the sponsoring part is where it hurts. 
> Fact is, only time I did an SRU took at least two emails to 
> #ubuntu-motu, and much nagging - there's no other word, sorry - on IRC, 
> for a debian/control one-word-change. For gnucash, I already had some 
> sponsor requests for other packages on (and some planned), and not 
> burning all the vessels on a problem where the users that could test 
> -proposed have probably given up already is something you have to learn 
> quickly if you want some of your work uploaded in Ubuntu. So no SRU for 
> gnucash, even though the actual work for submitting the request was 
> never the problem in the first place (work was done for Karmic anyway).
> 
> (Same for xvid - requesting the sync with pkg-multimedia would be 
> suicidal when nobody's been interested in an improved package, even with 
> the work done already.)

I'm sorry to hear that these cases weren't resolved quickly, especially
if the solution was quick and easy.

Have a great day,
 Daniel