What are you doing next Friday?

[Serge Hallyn]

Quoting Evan Broder (evan at ebroder.net):
> 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

I'd have no problem with this at all.  I've agonized over what to do in
this case myself.  I've chosen to ask the contributor whether they
preferred re-doing it themselves, or just wanted us to take care of the
patch.  I didn't want to 'cheat' them out of the experience of doing it
all themselves by just leaping in there and doing it.  But at the same
time if they *did* want to just dump the patch and move on, then I'm
just annoying them.

Would it be better to just make the changes, submit them (in my case,
as I likely don't have upload rights, do a new merge request in place
of theirs), and explain to them for next time what to do?

Even as I type this I keep going back and forth between thinking the
contributor would hate that or would prefer that.

thanks,
-serge