Sponsorship Process (Was: Re: Packaging Help)

[Daniel Holbach]

Am Donnerstag, den 24.09.2009, 18:07 +0200 schrieb Loïc Martin:
> The 
> main problem I'm afraid off when telling new contributors we'd rather 
> see them working on existing packages is that the sponsorship process 
> can get really unfriendly and obscure, unlike REVU. Having someone's 
> patch or diff.gz (that they spent countless hours on) sit for months 
> unlooked doesn't encourage anyone into contributing, and nagging on 
> #ubuntu-motu is nobody's idea of fun. Especially if everybody agree 
> those same "unmaintained" packages are the problem we would want to 
> solve in the first place[1].

How is the Sponsorship Process unfriendly and obscure? Can you
elaborate?

What you shouldn't forget is that we manage to process several hundred
patches and packages every month in the sponsoring queue. I realise that
there's sometimes an odd package or a long bug fix that doesn't get
reviewed quickly enough, but I hope we can fix that with the
#ubuntu-reviews channel. If somebody's on-call for the reviews, just
pester them to get an answers for it.


> Maybe having clear rules for Launchpad sponsoring would 
> make it more transparent too, like having fixed time limits for a bug 
> awaiting sponsorship to be looked at (twice a month, with set dates 
> maybe? or a countdown thing per bug?).

Maybe you could branch http://people.canonical.com/~dholbach/sponsoring
and patch it so that it does that count-down thing? :-)

While it maybe nice to implement something like "days since
ubuntu-*-sponsors was subscribed" we should not create too tough
expectations. A lot of us have a lot of other stuff to do and lives
apart from Ubuntu. We can't simply promise an x-hour-turn-around-time.

Have a great day,
 Daniel