Proposal for collaborative maintenance of packages

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hello Daniel,

Le lundi 19 décembre 2005 à 08:24 +0100, Daniel Holbach a écrit :
> > - team maintenance with SVN is more and more popular, and a good web
> >   interface above a SVN repo of Debian packages would help all those
> >   teams
> 
> I'd be in favour or a bzr solution, not because of random
> flame-war-feature-reasons, but of the central approach SVN takes. You
> have to handle permissions, have to take care of a lot of people, which
> is not a technical problem, but a social problem too. People do feel
> locked out.

For me this is a non-issue :
1/ I have heard lots of good about svk which brings the decentralized
thingy upon svn
2/ SVN is *much* more popular than anything else right now (at least
within Debian and that what is of interest to me right now, since I want
actual Debian developer to make use of this new infrastructure). I know
that because I'm an alioth admin where most SVN / arch / bzr / baz /
tla / whatever repo for Debian packaging are currently created.
3/ svn-buildpackage exists and works (and I don't know of any bzr
equivalent)
4/ SVN is easier to learn for most people and in particular those who
have experience with CVS (this might change, I know that bzr has done
big steps in the right direction)

So I propose to stop here this discussion about VCS before it turns out
into a flamewar. :-)

> > - we need to let skilled external contributors maintain packages for us
> >   (when they don't want to become DD)
> 
> Although this might be a bit early in the discussion, I want to raise
> awareness of other distributions that are there already and might be
> soon there. This shouldn't be a Debian<->Ubuntu solution, but have a
> broader spectrum from the beginning.

My spectrum is Debian<->everyone else. But I naturally thought of Ubuntu
since we're so close and because it's our interest to stay close !

> I informed the Launchpad team about this discussion, since I think it

Who are the members of the Launchpad team ?

> might be the best to have some kind of Launchpad integration for this.
> http://launchpad.net/distros already shows four distros and the bug
> tracker already works nicely across distribution 'borders'.

I agree that integration with Launchpad would be interesting, but as
long as Launchpad stays a closed-source thing, it will be difficult for
Debian to create anything relying on it. 

Regards,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

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