Idea: review + massive sync of Debian changes not involving new upstream versions?

[Lucas Nussbaum]

On 18/03/10 at 22:55 +1100, William Grant wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-03-18 at 12:33 +0100, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 11:36:26 (CET), Stefan Potyra wrote:
> > 
> > > Am Wednesday 17 March 2010 19:43:10 schrieb Lucas Nussbaum:
> > >> Hi,
> > >>
> > >> 5 lines summary:
> > >>   For universe packages that don't have anybody looking at them, I
> > >>   propose that, instead of letting them rot after Debian Import Freeze,
> > >>   we instead review the Debian changes that don't introduce new upstream
> > >>   versions, and continue to sync them (manually) to Ubuntu to get all
> > >>   the bug fixes that happen in Debian.
> > >
> > > While I think that's a noble goal, I fear we lack manpower to do this.
> > 
> > Well, AFAIUI, Lucas suggests that creating an annotated and properly
> > sorted (by e.g., priority, #bugs, etc.) was not terribly complicated,
> > given that all that data is already stored in UDD.
> > 
> > I think such a list would be a great opportunity for fixing low hanging
> > fruits, if it can be
> > 
> >  a) easily updated
> >  b) easily commented by contributors, to quickly triage false positives
> 
> http://qa.ubuntuwire.org/bugs/rcbugs/lucid/ already lists all the Debian
> RC bugs that are unfixed here. It has comment and dismissal
> functionality.

My idea was less focused than just "packages with RC bugs". For example,
I could quite efficiently review the changes for all packages matching
'.*ruby.*', and request syncs where applicable. This is likely to bring
quite a lot of useful fixes (though < RC severity) to Ubuntu.

But currently:
- I'm not sure if just using requestsync is appropriate for that, as it
  will flood archive admins with requests
- I'm not sure if this is welcomed (seems like it's OK)
- We don't have any infrastructure (but that could easily be changed).
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
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