Request For Candidates: Application Review Board

[Micah Gersten]

On 08/09/2010 04:53 PM, Elliot Murphy wrote:
> 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.

So will this end up punishing people who run the devel release in that
they will not be able to use the latest apps or will they be available
simultaneously in all releases in this new area?