Packaging Help

[Daniel Holbach]

Am Montag, den 21.09.2009, 14:30 -0400 schrieb Jordan Mantha:
> I'm not sure there's much of a distinction in terms of work and
> resources between doing packages reviews on REVU and in PPAs, bottom
> line, stuff has to get looked at and the good stuff sponsored. 

I'm a bit surprised to hear this as the "bottom line" from you, who
spent so much time on working on the Packaging Guide successfully
educating newcomers.

But maybe I was not clear enough: I wasn't talking about "finding
nuggets" or "improving packages from PPA".

The current state of things is:

      * people make use of PPAs to distribute fixes, new upstream
        versions, backports and the like
      * among them Upstream people who use this as a nice tool to
        distribute their software
      * also there's people asking more and more questions about how to
        things right and how to get things done in Ubuntu

I'm convinced it's possible to find a list of very easy-to-achieve
things that will improve the situation and help to bust some of the
myths around Ubuntu development and guide them in the right direction.


> Do you have any sense of how many of these people *want* to become
> Ubuntu developers. My experience is that many of these PPAs are
> upstreams/hobbyists who have no intention of becoming Ubuntu
> developers. Indeed, many people use PPAs *because* REVU, sponsorship,
> SRUs, etc. are seen as overly difficult and bureaucratic to be
> involved in.

Doesn't this strike you as something that we could fix with some good
and targeted documentation?

If so, what do you think we should cover?


> I think what Scott's trying to say is that for a great many of the PPA
> users, they are trying to work on top of Ubuntu, not for Ubuntu. 

This smells a bit like the old backports discussion we had years ago.
Backports weren't official and sometimes problematic. We achieved a lot
by getting Backports better integrated into our processes.

Same goes for PPAs - by making it clear how our processes work, what the
options are we gain a lot. Of course I'm not suggesting we merge every
possible package or patch, there's a lot of packages and PPAs out there
just for testing reasons and that's fine.

For the cases where people try to make Ubuntu better and fail to connect
with the Ubuntu developer base, we should think about what we can do to
make that connection happen.

Have a great day,
 Daniel