Role of the Sponsorship Queue

[Scott Kitterman]

"Emmet Hikory" <persia at ubuntu.com> wrote:

>Daniel Holbach wrote:
>> On 04.03.2010 04:57, Emmet Hikory wrote:
>>>     Not quite, and in two ways.  Firstly, I don't think there is any
>>> way that we can determine if someone is an Ubuntu Developer or not
>>> without asking them (as there's no clear way to distinguide
>>> Prospective Developers from arbitrary users, and no clear way to
>>> distinguish Contributing Developres who didn't happen to chat with the
>>> DMB from other Ubuntu Members).  Secondly, I'd really prefer to see
>>> sponsors discovering bugs in the sponsors queue that ought be in the
>>> reiviewers queue leave a bug comment like the following:
><...>
>> The unfortunate thing is: it's the reality.
>>
>> 1) Attach a patch to a bug of a random package: effectively nobody will
>> notice or care.
>> 2) "Make it a debdiff", get it into the Sponsoring Queue: it will
>> probably be applied.
>>
>> In your mail above you acknowledge how hard it is to make the
>> distinction between the two "categories of contributors". The proposal
>> to not allow patches from "non-developers" into Sponsoring does not even
>> try to solve the problem of those 2000 waiting patches, but, hey, "we
>> ought solve" it.
>>
>> What is this proposal and theoretical distinction good for? The proposal
>> to not allow patches from "non-developers" into the Sponsoring Queue
>> does not solve any problems we have.
>
>    Let me put this a different way.  I think the entire concept of a
>sponsorship queue is completely without merit unless we intend to
>differentiate between classes of patches using this queue.  Asking
>random folk to learn how to subscribe some team is just adding extra
>burden on patch submitters.  Let's drop it completely if we're not
>differentiating.
>
>    Now, I happen to believe that it's worth having a sponsors queue.
>I remember when we didn't have one.  We created it specifically so
>that those developers who didn't yet have upload rights to a given
>package could get priority for reviews of their candidate packages
>(which at the time primarily consisted of collections of the
>previously unreviewed patches).  If we don't wish to fast-track
>uploads for developers, that's fine, but I believe that we'll end up
>back in the days when people just repeatedly posted on IRC when they
>had a debdiff, and I think that's a waste of the submitters time and
>the time of anyone reading iRC (either in real-time or in logs).

This leaves out the class of submitter that is currently very motivated around one or two bugs, but has no current intent to become an Ubuntu developer.   I think this unfortunate for two reasons: 

1.  It misses a good chance to get a fix into the archive.

2.  It misses the chance for people who think they don't think they want to become Ubuntu developers to discover they are wrong. 

Scott K