What are you doing next Friday?

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 10:10:11AM -0800, Evan Broder wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Bryce Harrington <bryce at canonical.com> wrote:
> > Basically the items all need forwarded upstream and/or wrapped up in
> > debian packaging properly.  I'd only display them if the item includes
> > debdiff (or has a branch merge proposal that includes a debian/changelog
> > entry, if that can be detected).  Needless to say, the add_quickless
> > procedures should be amended to include a packaging step (for which I'm
> > sure you know of a suitable doc.)
> 
> This is something of a separate discussion, and I don't think it
> applies specifically to the quicklist items since they have other
> issues, but I did want to address it since you brought it up.
> 
> We should encourage good habits like writing changelogs and quilt
> patches, but we shouldn't do it at the cost of accepting the
> contribution at all. It's easy for a sponsor (who's obviously an
> experienced Ubuntu developer in their own right) to spend the 60
> seconds it takes to reformat the patches themselves, and it refocuses
> the discussion on the actual content of the change instead of the
> nitpicky details around our packaging processes. The only reason I can
> think of not to do this is if you can't come up with the necessary
> provenance information for the quilt header on your own.
> 
> When we see bare patches in the queue, we should be willing to
> quilt-ify them, add a changelog, and upload, then point the
> contributor at the docs so they can do it themselves next time. I
> usually use http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/udd-patchsys.html#develop-your-patch
> and http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/debian-dir-overview.html#the-changelog

Normally I totally agree (and do this myself many times).  I'd debate
that it takes merely 60 seconds, but perhaps I'm just a slow poke.

Really my point is more that these are being produced as part of a
procedure, and apparently are pretty quick to generate.  Since Daniel
complained that the pilot queue is clogged up, amending that procedure
to include the packaging work (rather than imposing it on pilots) would
be workable and would help ameliorate the queue clogging.

It could be as simple as just changing the docs for this procedure to
include those two links you posted.  It seems like the type of thing
that one motivated dedicated packager could handle.

But I certainly agree that we should be willing to do the packaging of
loose patches in general (indeed, that's mostly what I did my last
session).

Bryce