Patch pilot report and feedback

[Jani Monoses]

Hello,

this is a late and short summary of my first patch piloting experience 
on January the 31st.

Sponsored uploads for munin, glmark2 and mtdev which were listed in the 
QA sponsoring report page [1] and for totem which was requested on IRC.

Commented on two bug reports with patches which should go via debian and 
sugarlabs respectively, picked from [2]

There were a few things which confused me, possibly because I have not 
done much sponsoring before and because I have not read up thoroughly on 
UDD docs.

[1] http://reports.qa.ubuntu.com/reports/sponsoring/
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OperationCleansweep


* What is the difference between lists [1] and [2] ?

The Patch Pilot page does not mention why you would pick from one list 
or another but seems to suggest that [1] has higher priority.

Do bugs from the Cleansweep list go to the sponsoring page once they
are correctly formatted for packaging? Are they there because they are
not fully baked yet?

* Who owns specific issues?

  There are last comments on bugs and sometimes claims for reviews but 
generally I feel that some pieces implicitly belong to certain devs or 
teams - for instance I did not think of touching casper/initramfs or 
ubuntuone as I know there are people more qualified to handle those - 
and may even do it even if they are not specifically claimed.
However I am not that familiar with each package and whether the 
sponsoring of a bug has been promised in other channels.
I feel a patch pilot would be more helpful for outside contributors and
for packages which are not in certain team's care.

Consequently I tried picking uploads which have little chance of 
seriously affecting the system :)

* Bzr usage confusion

I was only familiar with 'debdiff against latest source package' type of
uploading on behalf of another dev, so it took me a while to figure out
how to make the same change to both bzr and the package making sure not
to accidentally introduce a delta however small. The number of more than 
one official sounding branch name in some projects (ubuntu/totem vs
desktop-team/totem IIRC) just caused me to have a few failed attempts at 
merging.


* When to reject a request?

Sometimes it seems a lot of time would be saved if a merge was not 
prepared and requested for inclusion, as it may come in via Debian 
shortly via a requested sync.

Jani