Patch pilot report 2010-12-02

[Barry Warsaw]

I just finished my stint as patch pilot, so here's a quick report about my
experience.  It's really the first time I've ever done any extensive work on
the sponsorship queue.  In the past, I've thought that I couldn't really
contribute much because I do not (yet <wink>) have upload rights.

It's definitely true that not having such rights makes things a bit more
difficult, but it's also true that it shouldn't stop anyone!  I think there's
valuable work that can be done even if you can't upload.  I hope it was
helpful for me to spend the time doing the research to understand the bug,
examine the proposed change, cross-reference the fix with upstream and/or
Debian, do a local build, and then comment on the merge proposal.

The way I approached the sponsorship queue was to tackle the issues that
appeared to have no other comments.  It can be depressing when you do good
work and it just languishes with no feedback at all - positive or negative.
So I wanted to get at least a comment on as many such items as possible.

I did spend the better part of my day working on the sponsorship queue.  I'm
used to the Launchpad world where we spent a full day as "on-call reviewer"
and nobody else was signed up for today, so I felt a full day was most
appropriate.

Probably the tool I used most was sponsor-patch(1), part of the
ubuntu-dev-tools package.  It's a great little tool for grabbing the source
branch and applying either a patch or merge proposal, then building the source
package.  I tend to use sbuild instead of pbuilder, so the --build option
isn't as helpful to me.

Here are the items I worked on.  I kind of wish I could have been more
productive, but being my first time I didn't have a good sense of whether I
was being too thorough or not thorough enough in my research and reviews.  It
should be easier next time.

* approved mp for bug 633036 and created debdiff; assigned bug to mvo
* https://code.launchpad.net/~clint-fewbar/ubuntu/maverick/php5/fix-mssql-segfault/+merge/35476
* https://code.launchpad.net/~clint-fewbar/ubuntu/karmic/mysql-dfsg-5.1/mysql-sru-343870/+merge/35366
* https://code.launchpad.net/~clint-fewbar/ubuntu/maverick/rrdtool/maverick-libdbi-soname-change/+merge/35607
* https://code.launchpad.net/~serge-hallyn/ubuntu/maverick/multipath-tools/fix-crash-on-shutdown/+merge/35674
* https://code.launchpad.net/~james-page/ubuntu/natty/xorg-docs/fix-682621/+merge/42214
* https://code.launchpad.net/~clint-fewbar/ubuntu/natty/libdbi/upstream-0.8.4/+merge/42296

-Barry
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