Merges - Pinging Previous Uploaders

[Jordan Mantha]

On Sat Jul 14, 2007 at 06:09:52PM +0900, Emmet Hikory wrote:
> On 7/14/07, Jordan Mantha <mantha at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > I think this is where having a good relationship with Debian/upstream is a
> > good idea, make that essential. I've always viewed it as Ubuntu users get
> > the best packaging because they get the depth of Debian and the broadness
> > of Ubuntu. We should be relying on upstream. If something's really very
> > intrusive or not unique to Ubuntu we should be sending it upstream, right?
> > Just this week I was going to do a sync of tea and it FTBFS in gutsy. Turns
> > out it was because gutsy has libgtk+2.0 from Debian experimental which
> > included a function that was also in tea so there was a naming collision. I
> > asked the Debian maintainer what to do, and gave me some hints. We emailed
> > upstream and the same day there was a new tea release fixing the bug. Now
> > instead of doing a merge to fix something that only a problem in gutsy, I
> > get to do a sync.  That's the power I think we need to tap into more.
> 
>     I suspect that merges being done while excellent work like the
> above is underway may be one of the reasons that merges are perceived
> as being "stolen".  I'd recommend the filing of merge bugs with
> self-assignment as an easy way to indicate that such a process is
> underway.  These can easily be retitled to sync bugs if one is
> successful, or closed with the changelog if it requires a merge after
> all.

Well, I'd percieve that as my fault, not the mergers fault if it got
"stolen" if I didn't file a bug. Just today I saw William merged gchemutils
0.6.3 when geser, azeem, and I are waiting for some work to be done to get
the new upstream version (0.8.1) into Debian. What we need is to be able to
communicate at a level above a bug report. I suppose we could have filed a
bug against gchemutils saying we'll merge it in the future so don't worry
about it for now, but it somehow seems like an inappropriate place
sometimes.
 
> > I also think we should have package "whiteboards" on Launchpad or
> > somewhere where we can put notes for each other.
> 
>     I believe that either BZR (as advocated by Reinhard) or
> README.Debian-source is an ideal place for these notes, as they are
> both convenient to review while working on the package.
> README.Debian-source might be lost during a sync, but for the most
> part, any Ubuntu change that resulted in a sync doesn't really require
> significant additional information to be posted, as any future Ubuntu
> change is likely to be for an entirely different issue.  Yet another
> web resource just complicates things.

I think I can get a whiteboard added to the
launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/<package> page. I think putting notes in BZR
is really suboptimal at this point because we have very few packages that
use it. Putting info in a README.Ubuntu or something seems ok, but I'd like
people to be able to see stuff *before* they grab the source.

So I see two issues:
  1. Being able to "lock" a merge when you're working on it. This should be
done via bug reports.
  2. Some packages have tricky things or larger scale issues and we should
have some way to share per-package information. I think a LP whiteboard
could work for this.

-Jordan