Future of REVU and Debian Mentors

[Jordan Mantha]

On 7/30/07, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Andy Price <andy-price at ubuntu.com> writes:
> > At one point I was getting interested in developing REVU but I think I
> > heard a rumour that launchpad was going to be used for reviewing
> > packages in future. Is that true?
>
> Personally, I don't think this will come in near future, if at
> all. Therefore I feel that it makes sense to work on it in any case,
> since this way, we can adapt it more easily to our needs.

Mark told me he would like to see REVU3 be integrated into Launchpad.
Considering how we don't even have REVU2 yet I'm guessing it's a ways
off ;-)

> Curently, my plan is rather to integrate it with PPAs. Currently, the
> REVU2 specs says that it implements an apt-get'able repository. This
> could be changed to "it uses an apt-get'able repository, just what the
> PPAs provide".
>
> You wouldn't upload then a package to revu, but submit a review
> request. REVU would then download the source and register it. Then it
> could visualise the contents of the package. This would solve the
> following problems:
>
>  * Traffic (tiber is making > 500g traffic a month)
>  * hard drive space

Fantastic. I think personally that it would be good for MOTU to have a
framework/server that we can use to set up scripts to data mine or
parse Launchpad. I think off-loading much of the "dirty work" to
Launchpad, like PPAs, bzr branches, etc. is good but my feeling is
that Launchpad will never be 100% everything MOTU needs. Launchpad is
designed to work across a very broad range of open source projects and
I don't think it will ever be specific enough to our particular needs
that we can use it for *everything*.

> > Also, I had reservations about how difficult it would be to test any
> > changes I made to it. I guess if those  issues were cleared up I might
> > be interested in doing some REVU coding again, if only to scratch some
> > of my own itches.
>
> I think REVU2 should be written as django application. Currently it
> isn't, but this is mainly because I didn't have the motivation yet to
> look into it more deeply.
>
> Writing it as django application helps with the following problems:
>
>  * easy setting up (uses internal webserver and sqlite database)
>  * makes it possible to write a testsuite

Awesome. I think that sounds great.

-Jordan