Request For Candidates: Application Review Board

[Elliot Murphy]

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 5:34 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
> Yes, so you achieve the same result by getting the package into the
> development release and then doing an immediate backport.  The only barrier to
> this is lack of people to review new packages, so I don't see how creating
> some other process to have people do work that is working around the lack of
> people to do the current process is going to help.

This is a fair point, and staffing the review team will be crucial to
the success of this new process. You are also right that adding this
parallel system is not likely to increase the amount of labor
available to the existing REVU and backports processes.

However, I believe the new process will be easier to market to
application developers that we definitely need to be winning over, and
the flowchart (subjectively, when I imagine explaining this to an app
developer that I'm trying to win over) feels less clunky than going
into the dev release and then immediately into backports. It also
prevents the app developer from needing to run the development release
of Ubuntu, instead they can stay on a stable foundation and focus
exclusively on building the app without worrying about the platform
shifting beneath their feet from day to day. I love running the dev
version of Ubuntu, but I've seen it stress out upstream app developers
over and over when they just want to focus on building their app
without thinking about libraries or desktop changing underneath them.

Also, there is a 2-3 month period each release cycle where we should
not put new packages into the development release (from feature freeze
through to when the new archive opens), and this new process avoids
putting app developers in a holding pattern or stall if they show up
during that freeze.
-- 
Elliot Murphy | https://launchpad.net/~statik/