Sponsorship Process (Was: Re: Packaging Help)

[Daniel Holbach]

Am Freitag, den 25.09.2009, 20:44 +0200 schrieb Loïc Martin:
> There's no visibility at all. Basically, your patch/diff.gz can be 
> uploaded the same week, or go for month without being looked at. Nothing 
> in Launchpad tells prospective contributors (or upstreams) which 
> packages they have chances to see their work used, and which packages 
> they should ignore because no sponsor is interested in seeing them improve.
> 
> There's also no timeframe, for example no way to see if a backport 
> request that has been tested and reported working by 2 or 3 contributors 
> is going to be ACKed in a meaningful time. A backport or a fix to a 
> stable release looses much point if it only gets ACKed a few weeks 
> before the development release is delivered, because at this point most 
> of your users have moved to the newer version (excluding LTS). How do 
> you convince upstream it's better to work within Ubuntu (so a better 
> release is backported, or a fix done), if they can see that only a PPA 
> gives them the possibility to make Ubuntu better?
> 
> The sponsorship process doesn't tell you what to do when a patch is 
> roting in Launchpad. For contributors, it's just a black box. It's hard 
> to plan your work that way.

Do you think the idea of IRC reviewers that can be pinged will help with
that? If not, what do you think would help?

The problem with "a long list of stuff that need to be done" is that
people naturally will pick what interests them, what they work on
generally anyway or what they have time for right now.

Which other ideas do you have to fix it?

Have a great day,
 Daniel