REVU - Cleanup of the "Needs Review" section

[James Westby]

On Sun, 2008-11-02 at 00:57 +0100, Siegfried Gevatter (RainCT) wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> 
> There's currently a quite big list of packages in the "Needs review"
> section of REVU, many of which date back from several months ago.
> 
> I'm pondering on running a script to move all those which don't have
> "jaunty" in debian/copyright to the "Needs work" section, leaving a
> comment asking to change it to "jaunty", check the standards version
> and some general recommendations (or perhaps just a link to a new wiki
> page), so that we get ride of all those packages whose author isn't
> coming back or which still need work anyway. I do understand that this
> could be annoying for some users, though, so I'm asking here to hear
> some more thoughts. Does anyone have strong objections to this?

I would say don't do it.

In my opinion it gives a terrible impression to those who have packages
on the site. You could end up with a situation where they post a
package, get zero feedback, then receive an automated response asking
them to change something pretty trivial in the package, which they do,
and then they get zero feedback again.

If you are concerned about a large number of items in the list then we
should consider expiration, but I don't think this is the right way to
do it.

I don't really see the problem with having a large number of packages
in the list though, whether they are in that list, in an expired list
or just temporarily moved to the "Needs work" queue it's still the
same number of things on REVU.

It does give a bad impression to new contributors though, as they may
not understand why their package is not being looked at. I think we
should instead attempt to avoid this by reconsidering how REVU is
presented. We should ensure that it is not seen as the place to upload
your package to get in included in the Ubuntu, but as the place to put
something for potential inclusion. For instance REVU could add a field
to enter a justification for why Ubuntu should do the work to maintain
the package, and more prominently point the user at the Debian wnpp
package for a way to get the package in to Ubuntu if they can not
convince an Ubuntu developer to upload the package.

Thanks,

James