Summary from UDD meeting 2011-03-23

[Scott Kitterman]

On Friday, March 25, 2011 04:10:06 pm Robert Collins wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 9:00 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > I do agree with Scott that import reliability is really critical to
> > adoption. You can't use UDD if the branch is out of date!  BFBIP seems
> > like a step after getting wide adoption of 'bzr branch' instead of
> > 'apt-get source'.
> 
> They seem pretty complementary to me: I mean, if you can push(*) to
> build, thats removes a manual step from the pipeline : its a pretty
> significant change.
> 
> We have in the past fallen into a trap of aiming for 100% in each step
> *before* we move onto the next one. That means we're well past the
> point of getting a net benefit (think 80-20 rule) by the time we start
> moving on. These import problems have a viciously long tail : isn't it
> better to be making things a lot better *most* of the time?
> 
> I acknowledge the psychological impact of 'if it doesn't work always
> its hard to remember' - but we're already well past the common working
> set of any one developer, and Martin isn't suggesting that imports be
> abandoned, just that closing the loop is *as* important as improving
> the import story.
> 
> -Rob
> 
> (*) By which I mean some command that generates a validator, signs it,
> does $whatever with it.

I'd add that I don't see build from branch is the killer feature that will 
make this all take off.  My recollection from when I've used UDD is that 
things took longer, felt awkward, and had extra steps in comparison to apt-get 
source, dpkg-buildpackage, dput.  Build from branch helps that a bit, but it 
doesn't really fundamentally change the 'is it ready for me' equation.

My view of the 80/20 rule on UDD is that getting at least per-upload 
granularity revision data into a $VCS so we have sufficient data for post-
mortum autopsies and just trying to figure out when and maybe why things were 
done hits at least the 80% mark on the long term value of UDD (I recognize 
that full time developers who regularly touch the same source packages will 
likely have a different assessment of where the value proposition lies in 
UDD).  This may be part of why I consider import reliabilty more important 
than new functionality.

Scott K