SRU bug subscription for sponsors

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le 14/06/2023 à 22:32, Robie Basak a écrit :
>
> If sponsors aren't prepared to do this, I question whether what they are
> doing is actually useful. The harm is that they are leaving
> non-uploaders in the cold, and review teams are spending unnecessary
> effort that could be diverted to doing the reviews that only they can
> do.

The issue is not really 'to be prepared to do this'. I do agree with you 
that the sponsors should be engaged in the process, especially when 
sponsoring work from someone who isn't familiar with all the details of 
the system. It is especially true for SRU uploads which often need 
follow-ups to deal with the issues you mentioned. Subscribing to the 
corresponding launchpad bug makes sense in that context and that's 
something I would recommend doing.

Where I disagree is that it should be forced on us this way, without 
even letting us the change to have a public discussion here before 
having the change in action.

A few concerns I have

1. I've noticed that people (even in our teams at Canonical) don't keep 
up with bug emails and some end up just ignoring anything coming from 
launchpad. The issue isn't new and isn't due to the new bot, but the bot 
is adding to the problem.

2. You argue that we should expect that the people asking for sponsoring 
aren't familiar with the processes or they wouldn't ask for sponsoring 
such they need guidance and involvement from their sponsors. While 
that's true for a class of contributors it's often not the case. I'm 
regularly sponsoring work for people in my team who are perfectly able 
to follow up on their changes and know the process, it just happens that 
sometime they need to upload a fix outside of the packagesets they have 
access to

3. You say "sponsors will follow through on uploads until they land", 
could the script be made to be smart enough to unsubscribe the sponsor 
at that point? Launchpad bugs are often noisy (users sometime comment on 
unrelated closed issues which seem similar to what they face, they ask 
for guidance on how to install an SRU updates, ...) which adds to 
problem 1. Yes I can go to unsubscribe manually if I'm bothered enough 
but that's just one more annoyance and manual action needed which 
contributes to the 'it's easier to just filter launchpad emails in a 
folder and ignore those'.

Cheers,
Sébastien