Call for votes: Developer Membership Board restaffing

[Jani Monoses]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:22:58 -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:

> Hello,
[snip]
> That's certainly true, but I think this is something that the DMB has a
> duty to correct.  Frankly, I think there's no reason that Adam and Björn
> couldn't have been ready for upload rights by January, *if* the DMB's

I must ask the same question as the Debian maintainer who endorsed Björn's 
application: 'Are you kidding? :)'
I never assumed for a moment that he had not long been an uploader of 
LibreOffice.

I think the DMB members did their job well by following the existing 
guidelines for such approval procedures and I also think those guidelines 
are in need of adjustments.

It seems ridiculous to have such a bureaucratic process that prevents for 
example someone who more or less single-handedly has been taking care of 
LibreOffice in Ubuntu for the past two years get upload rights *for that 
set of packages only*.

Extra caution is desirable when approving core developer or universe 
upload rights but it is counterproductive to have the same rules for 
applicants of restricted upload rights.

I've seen similar problems in the past two years where people from Linaro 
would simply not bother applying for maintainership of otherwise good 
packages and preferred keeping them in PPAs at the detriment of those who 
only use the official Ubuntu archives, because again, the requirements 
seemed daunting.

I honestly think the process should lose the 'pledge of allegiance' 
aspect for single uploaders and just get out of the way, saving time and 
annoyance both for those uploaders and for the Ubuntu developers who have 
to do the sponsoring.

cheers
Jani