Patch pilot report and feedback

[Bryce Harrington]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2011 at 10:57:34PM +0200, Jani Monoses wrote:
> [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.

#1 are patches which someone has specifically flagged to be sponsored.

#2 are just bugs that happen to have patches attached to them.

In theory, list #1 should contain items more likely to be actionable
since they've been through some sort of review, whereas #2 is more of a
pulling from the firehose type thing.

> 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?

In theory yes, although in practice it sounds like the volunteer
staffing for #2 never really materialized (crowdsourcing fail I guess),
so it's not sufficiently doing the processing from #1->#2, so Daniel
asked that sponsoring staff take on part of that workload as well.

> * 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.

No, the original idea was to get sponsoring developers to expand the
breadth of what they look at.  I suppose most of us focus on the areas
we're most comfortable/experienced with by nature, but sometimes the
areas that seem scariest are also the ones that need the most help, and
where a small fix can have a broad benefit.

Bryce