Call for votes: Developer Membership Board restaffing

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday, January 31, 2013 09:23:39 AM Jani Monoses wrote:
> 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.

What's in the current guidelines that needs changing?

> 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.

I think this is a difficult problem.  On one hand, I agree that sometimes the 
barriers are too high, but I'm not sure how to fix that just based on rules 
(once again - I don't know the details of these specific applications, so I'm 
speaking generally).  

One class of people that should be easy to generally approve are Debian 
developers who want PPU for packages they maintain in Debian.  I think they 
should generally be approved, but, OTOH, in years of being on the release team 
the single most inappropriate upload for the end stage of the release cycle 
I've had to reject was done by such a person.  The upload had enough things 
wrong with it and was so invasive, so late in the release cycle that I am 
completely confident this person got PPU without knowing anything about Ubuntu 
specific processes or schedules.  It can go too far the other way too.

Scott K