MOTU Meeting Minutes for 2008-11-14

[Emmet Hikory]

== Review MOTU Decision process ==

Emmet Hikory led a discussion to talk about how the current decision
process (0) was working for MOTU, and if it suited out needs.  Some
people expressed dissatisfaction with stagnation of ideas and
discussions on the mailing lists.  Others expressed concern that with
current low attendance at MOTU Meetings, any meeting-based procedure may
leave some people unrepresented.

There was a side discussion on the impact of changes in the decision
policy on attendance to MOTU Meetings, and how to ensure that
discussions led to conclusions, rather than being left to age in the
mailing list archives.  Morten Kjeldgaard volunteered to organise
discussion on the mailing list for a more streamlined procedure, where
most operational decisions would be taken in MOTU Meetings, and anything
that seemed unfinished or likely to benefit from significant discussion
would use the current more complex decision policy.

There was also side discussion on whether the current MOTU Meeting times
might be a factor in attendance, and how to change the times to better
suit more people.  Given geographic distribution, and that all major
timezone clusters were represented in the meeting, no better times were
identified.

== Discuss usefulness of a wnpp package for use with Ubuntu ITPs ==

Emmet Hikory led a discussion about management of needs-packaging bugs,
which are currently cluttering up the bugs-without-a-package list, are
hard to search through, and are not carefully maintained, offering
Jordan Mantha's suggestion that perhaps using a "wnpp" pseudopackage as
is done in Debian would have some merit.

Opinions ranged from putting needs-packaging on brainstorm, going back
to using a wiki page, ignoring the mess, mass-uploading all Ubuntu-local
stuff to Debian, and using a wnpp launchpad project.  Many people
expressed the opinion that having a pseudopackage would be bad, even if
Launchpad could support it, and having an Ubuntu-local "wnpp" package
would be prone to cause confusion.  Emmet was assigned to speak with the
Launchpad developers and report to MOTU as to what options launchpad
could support towards making an appropriate decision.

0: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU/Decisions