contributions

[Stephan Hermann]

Hi,

On Wed, 14 May 2008 16:05:25 +0900
"Emmet Hikory" <emmet.hikory at gmail.com> wrote:

> Stephan Hermann wrote:
> >  1. Dev/Contributor should work as first duty on the packages he/she
> >  touched the last time. Therefore, the dev/contributor don't have to
> >  check for merge/sponsor bugs in the first place.
> 
>     While this is often the case, there are sometimes dependencies
> between packages that mean that other packages must be merged first.
> Also, depending on the focus of the individual developer, it may be
> that upgrading a specific package is of significant importance towards
> meeting some goal, and so efforts on that package may be prioritised.

Yes...for this there is, as mentioned, IRC or eMail to ask the last
uploader to take care about it, or if there is no message in time, I
would do the merge myself, or a contributor is doing it, and ping on
the channel for sponsoring...

> 
> >  2. LP is hard to track to. Regarding, that we don't have special
> >  maintainers for packages, you can't track all the time the status
> > or new bugs of all packages/bugs filed at LP. Yes, it sometimes sad
> > for the contributor...but the easiest way is to go online and ping
> > someone for checking.
> 
>     This is extremely timezone dependent: it is not infrequent for
> developers to be involved primarily in their personal evening (~4
> hours).  This often means that during a given week, finding the
> appropriate person may require that the seeker be relatively close,
> and that developers in e.g. Western United States, Australia, and
> Central Europe may find little active time in common.

As people are aware of irc proxies and running them 24 hours on a
server, I think it's ok, to just ping on irc..and via backlog there is
the possibility to get the ping just in time..
Even more, freenode has notes which you can send to the user directly.


> 
> >  I, for myself, don't check for the packages I touched last for
> > bugs, because it takes too much time...and time for bugfixing and
> > other things can be done, after I checked if the package I touched
> > last is a sync or merge...
> 
>     While I can understand that this workflow works faster for you,
> I'm not certain it actually saves total time, as it seems to me that
> combining all available fixes from several bugs for a single
> upload/build cycle is likely less effort overall than repeatedly
> updating the same package to address various reported issues.
> 

The problem here is, that many bugs are fixed with new upstream
versions. Right now, there is no way to tell, (only via guessing) for
which release the bugreport is for. As the time of doing merges/syncs
is counted, we need to get things done...which means, more syncs, less
work more time for real bugfixing.

As known, I'm always there for sponsoring requests via IRC, and for
others as well via jabber or email.

regards,


\sh