Proposing a New App Developer Upload Process

[Emmet Hikory]

Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Thursday, September 06, 2012 05:05:41 AM Emmet Hikory wrote:
> >     Independently of the conflict resolution model, I still don't understand
> > why we would need to consider such a collection of software "external",
> > beyond the historical precedent: is there a reason we want to prevent an
> > interested Ubuntu Developer from fixing a bug in one of these packages? Do
> > we feel that having two clearly documented competing different processes
> > for the inclusion of software will help our users to be able to run the
> > software they prefer?  Do we want to prevent upstream developers from being
> > able to maintain their software as part of Ubuntu?  Should flavours be
> > restricted from seeding packages submitted by the original developers
> > unless they are willing to override the upstream submission?
> 
> This alternate submission model will have it's own tools, processes and 
> procedures.  I doubt that all Ubuntu developers will be sufficiently aware of 
> these that the ability to upload into the alternate process should be allowed 
> by default.

    While I can accept this argument in terms of Ubuntu Developer access to
insulated packages and conversely for access by developers of insulated
packages to the Ubuntu archive, I believe you to be unnecessarily conflating
separable concepts by claiming it to be true for "[t]his alternate submission
model".  I would hope firstly that we don't end up arbitrarily rejecting
applications submitted through MyApps simply because they should instead be
submitted as system packages, and secondly that we could provide sufficient
education to our developers of the the nature and restrictions of some
collection of insulated software which we consider to be part of Ubuntu, but
not (or perhaps not yet) given the human review required to be uninsulated,
that it becomes safe to apply our regular upload permissions model.

    If we do continue to consider it an external third-party repository,
albeit one we permit to be enabled by default during installation, then I
suggest we should take extra care to make sure that we have a well-discussed
mechanism to adopt these packages into the distribution itself (whether
insulated or not), as some of them may be ideal for seeding by some flavour,
and we most definitely do not want to create anything that could give the
impression that we are only willing to grant developers this sort of access
for applications that we believe to be unsuitable or unusable by default.

> It does raise an interesting question about the need for a group of extras 
> 'gardeners' (in the same sense MOTU are Ubuntu archive 'gardeners').  Outside 
> the ARB we don't have such a thing now, AFAIK, and we might want to get such a 
> group if there are people interested.

    Is this something the ARB could do independently, delegating upload
rights to extras to some group of interested folk who might volunteer to
assist upstream developers keep their applications well groomed, or would
it also require the involvement of other approval bodies?  If the former,
I would suggest that the ARB consider such a thing (and policies surrounding
it), and make a call for volunteers.  If the latter, I'd suggest that anyone
with interest in doing such a thing draft some guidelines for how it would
work, garner the review and approval of the ARB, and help get it approved
by whatever necessary hierarchy of authorities - even if we initially have
no members of such a group beyond the ARB, if we expect to scale to very
large numbers of applications, we will likely need more available hands
to assist with the various exception cases and I suspect we would all be
happier with random folk trusted by the ARB being granted these rights than
with the members of the ARB feeling overwhelmed with such administrative
work to the degree that they don't feel they have time for accepting new
packages or overseeing transitions between releases.

-- 
Emmet HIKORY