Role of the Sponsorship Queue

[Emmet Hikory]

Daniel Holbach wrote:
> On 03.03.2010 14:37, Martin Pitt wrote:
>> Daniel Holbach [2010-03-03 14:11 +0100]:
>>> , should they be checking two different lists based on the
>>> motivation of the patch author?
>>
>> I'm a bit undecided on that, TBH. On the one hand, simplicity is nice
>> (just having one queue), OTOH we'll never be able to drive that queue
>> down to zero, so it's also a motivation/get things stuck problem.
>
> I'm not sure I understand. Can you explain what do you mean by
> "motivation/get things stuck problem"?
>
> Let me recap: we have lots of bugs with patches attached that are
> supposed to fix problems, we don't have enough people to review all of
> them, we probably will never get down to zero. How exactly will it help
> if we'd ask patch contributors to go to queue A if they're interested in
> contributing more closely to Ubuntu Development and if not, go to queue B?

    I don't think it's about motivation, but rather about the status
of the submitter.  If someone is not an Ubuntu Developer, have them
just submit a patch and call it done.  That makes it simple and easy.
If someone *is* an Ubuntu Developer, let's make sure there is a way
that they can get their work uploaded for the case where they can't
upload to a package directly (using as a definition of "Ubuntu
Developer anyone falling into any of the categories on the wiki (1)).

    Right now, there is a huge problem in that far to few developers
spend time looking at the patches that have been submitted.  That
needs fixing, and we ought encourage more people to review patches.
But there are two problems with attempting to merge this into the
sponsors queue:

1) It falsely restricts the set of people who can review/process the
patch to the set of people who happen to have upload rights to the
package in Ubuntu.

2) It falsely inflates the sponsors queue, delaying upload of fixes by
active Ubuntu Developers who just didn't happen to have upload rights
to the package they fixed.

    We'd do a lot better to try to promote developers joining the
review team, and gathering and fixing as many of the already submitted
patches as possible.  This work doesn't need to be split or sorted by
packageset, and shoudn't be organised in such a way that it actively
interferes with our developers getting their work uploaded.

    One thought on a way to encourage this would be to change the
phrasing "work on bug fixes and new packages" to "work on bug fixes
and patch review" on the UbuntuDevelopers wiki page.  I'm sure there
also are many other ways to point people in the right direction.

1: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopers
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