SRU bug subscription for sponsors

[Andreas Hasenack]

Hi,

On Thu, Jun 15, 2023 at 6:50 AM Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> 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

Good ;)

> that the sponsors should be engaged in the process, especially when
> sponsoring work from someone who isn't familiar with all the details of

It's not just familiarity. Sometimes the person just doesn't have
enough privileges to take an action, like nominate a series, or retry
autopkgtests. Specially retry autopkgtests.

> 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.

I agree.

>
> 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.

Well, the discussion is happening now.

> 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.

gmail is super bad at filtering email, agreed. What other way would we
have to follow the progress of an upload that was sponsored? Who is in
the best position to do that?

> 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

Or retry an autopkgtest with triggers or special options. Besides the
question of ACLs, where most sponsored people wouldn't even be able to
do it, there is a tricky learning curve to deal with autopkgtest and
migration issues. So much that it's a standard recurring question when
someone applies for core dev privileges.

>
> 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

Maybe, but once a bug is "fix released" (since the fix landed), there
normally aren't many follow-ups to it. If there are, then it might
have introduced a regression, in which case you would definitely want
to know about it, or it's another type of comment and you can easily
unsubscribe from the bug then.

> 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'.

Imagine the annoyance of the SRU team when they find a bug that was
supposedly verified, tags flipped, but the package didn't even build
(it's an FTBFS) :) Somebody must have gotten an email about it. Could
that email be one of those that are being ignored?

Or when somebody asks why the sru hasn't landed yet, and it has
current autopkgtest failures that the sponsored person cannot do
anything about other than ask for help somewhere, perhaps in the bug.
Would that be lost too in some folder?

I do believe sponsoring is more than pressing a button and forgetting
about it. And I wonder how it's working in the new patch pilot
program, if uploads are being followed through, or being forgotten
after dput (my shift will be in a few days).