Future of REVU and Debian Mentors

[Reinhard Tartler]

"Jordan Mantha" <mantha at ubuntu.com> writes:

> Simply putting debian/ in a bzr branch with a file that has the URL
> for upstream tarball (which should be in a PPA) would work.

As I explained in the article in my wiki [1], this doesn't work for any
package that doesn't use a patch system. And furthermore, why should I
use a clumsy patch system if I can have a proper VCS like bazaar?

>> [1] http://wiki.tauware.de/misc:vcs-packaging

>> Emmet Hikory wrote additionally:
>> > With the exception of #3, I believe these requirements are soon to
>> > be met by LP itself, and would suggest the following workflow as a
>> > LP-specific alternative to REVU:
>>
>> Again, this is not directed at Emmet specifically, but to the whole MOTU
>> community:
>>
>> I'm a bit sad that there seems to be a general attitude among MOTUs that
>> we get the tools we are working with crafted by either Debian or
>> Launchpad. This raises the assumption that there is not much technical
>> understanding needed for packaging software in ubuntu. I do not think
>> this is true. I rather think that we should focus more on crafting tools
>> which aid us in the daily workflow. With 'us' I mean 'we, the community
>> of Ubuntu Developers'.
>
> Well, tbh, I'm a bit sad that we need to divert energy from actually
> doing MOTU work to writing web apps,

I disagree with you. Crafting tools for MOTU (web-app or commandline
tool), *is* an important task for MOTUs.

>  especially when they don't get done.

We don't manage to fix universe either.

> You and Stefan did amazing work on REVU and I think all the MOTU
> world is thankful for it, no doubt about it, but REVU2 hasn't seemed
> to get going and I don't see people working on it. Is there enough
> interest and ability to write apps like this? If there is then great!
> If not though, rather than hobble around with "One day we'll get it
> done" maybe we should quite while we are ahead and look to somewhere
> else for what we need. I'm proud of what MOTU has done, but I think we
> need to be practical as well.

And this is exactly the attitude which makes me sad :(

> People starting projects, but often do not finishing, scripts/apps
> before they even know what's really needed can be a problem. One of my
> biggest gripes with FLOSS, in general, that I have is that people
> often don't "finish" anything. It's just perpetual Beta state, or
> maybe more often Alpha, and it's all constantly changing. It often
> comes off as "half baked" or mediocre.

This is typical for (unpaid) opensource software. And I don't think it
is unhealthy for the Free Software community either!

> So lets get a set of useful tools, lets properly document them, and
> package it up. Perhaps a wiki page with needed tools would help
> organize?

The only thing that does help is actually start coding. For organizing
purposes, I think launchpad can help us here. Let's push all branches
for MOTU crafted tools to the MOTU Team, and use the whiteboard and
branch status settings for stating if their mature or superseeded or
something.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4