Future of REVU and Debian Mentors

[Emmet Hikory]

On 8/3/07, Andy Price <andy-price at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> I do like this idea of launchpad providing package reviewing features
> but, even with the addition of PPAs later this month, I'm not quite sure
> it's more attractive than REVU at the moment. The ability for non-MOTUs
> to leave comments is the one advantage that launchpad has over REVU to me.

    The big advantage to me is a single workflow tool, to reduce
confusion regarding the package, and associated work to get the
package into the archive.

> I think it would be good to throw some more ideas at the launchpad devs
> and help them to understand REVU feature requirements such as:

    I'm not sure these are all useful for other use cases, and it
might be useful to consider the requirements as part of a wider
solution for MOTU tools.

> - Automatic lintian and linda runs

    Firstly, developers should really run these themselves, and
secondly, development workstations / chroots are likely to have the
latest tools, with the latest warnings, whereas any stable tool is
more likely to run the latest LTS, and therefore be prone to either
producing no-longer meaningful information, or not generating now
meaningful information.

    More generally, it might be nice to have regular linda and lintian
runs over the Ubuntu archive: I suspect there's quite a lot that could
be done to improve the packaging of existing packages, regardless of
REVU, PPA, etc.  Debian has one (1) for lintian, although I'm not sure
how much it's used.

> - Linking bugs to PPAs and/or packages in them

    This would be nice, as would be the ability to link a bug to a BZR
branch.  This is useful beyond package review, as it is meaningful for
all of Ubuntu, other distributions, and upstream projects.

> - Ability to browse files in source packages uploaded to PPAs

    This seems like extra load on the already loaded LP servers.  In
my experience, I need to dget the package to review it properly
anyway, so the browsing is somewhat secondary (as one can always do it
locally).

> - Debdiffs between uploads of a package to a PPA

    This is another thing that doesn't seem as useful to me.  The
debdiffs between packages are a nice way to see what's changed, but I
find that when reviewing, I need to download the entire package again
anyway (or at least the .dsc and .diff.gz files), and that the debdiff
is more a quick way to see if the work requested was done.  I think it
would be better to spend time building a better set of common
reviewing scripts, and making these also available to packagers, so
that packages could be auto-reviewed prior to upload.

1: http://lintian.debian.org/

-- 
Emmet HIKORY