Request For Candidates: Application Review Board

[Stephan Hermann]

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 01:45:53PM +0200, Christoph Witzany wrote:
> On 08/17/2010 12:37 PM, Stephan Hermann wrote:
> > On Monday, August 16, 2010 05:52:38 pm Martin Pitt wrote:
> >    
> >> Stephan Hermann [2010-08-16 16:46 +0200]:
> >>      
> >>> So, we are pushing those "non-permanent" applications to ubuntu and we
> >>> (as in ubuntu) take care, that this doesn't destroy our distro?
> >>>        
> >> Hm, I think this misunderstanding keeps appearing here: The entire
> >> point of those apps are that we _don't_ have to include them all into
> >> Ubuntu.
> >>      
> > ra
> 
> While I think it would be wise to make this software clearly 
> distinguishable from Ubuntu(Community) supported applications (maybe by 
> another Category like the partner repository), I do not think that the 
> hosting by Ubuntu/Canonical matters too much.

Well, if I clearly add the partner repository of Canonical to my sources.list, 
I know that not Ubuntu is responsible for e.g. sun-java6* packages.
The URL for this is named *.canonical.com, so if I have a problem, 
I have to ask someone from Canonical not from Ubuntu.

If this pocket will be hosted under Ubuntu domain names, I would think that
those packages/apps are Ubuntu supported in some way (even universe is 
supported by the Community) therefore I will raise any issues 
towards Ubuntu devlopment.

 
> Likewise in the Android market nobody would blame Google for strangely 
> behaving apps and there is no strict QA or other authorization process 
> (IPhone ...) in place.

It's not like Android/IPhone App Store. 

For those app stores there is only Google/Apple and the App Developer to blame, 
most likely Google will be blamed when there is a buggy or misbehaving app 
on their app store.

AFAIK Apple has some sort of reviewing QA for the apps in their app store, so
they are taking of the support burden or the caring burden. 

But we are not Google, we are not Apple, we are not Canonical (from the Ubuntu viewpoint).
We are Ubuntu, and we are a lot of contributing people, who are trying to have Ubuntu in a 
good shape and want to have good quality. 
So if we have apps who are poorly maintained, even when they are only for one stable release,
I do see many users who will use those apps who will blame Ubuntu. They won't blame Canonical 
or the app maintainer.

If we are delivering those apps via Ubuntu namespace, we will be responsible, eventually not in a 
way that we are at fault, but we do hold our heads and names for those apps out of the window.

Users of Ubuntu are demanding good quality from us, and having simple apps with less or no support
in the future, the try of giving "good quality" and a good reputation will be a ride against windmills.

The new pocket needs to be an outside hosted archive, which has nothing to do with Ubuntu.
Therefore we need something like the partner repos from Canonical for those apps, which is really
different from the Ubuntu one.

Regards,
\sh
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