Minutes of the MOTU meeting Tue 5 May

[James Westby]

Hi all,

These are the (belated) minutes of the MOTU meeting last week.

== Present ==

* Andrew Mitchell
* Nathan Handler
* Scott Kitterman
* Emilio Pozuelo Monfort
* Siegfried Gevatter
* James Westby

== Notification System ==

The first topic suggested was the notification system. It was pointed 
out that a lot of the issues people had with this weren't really
about "MOTU", but about lack of discussion and communication.

James and Scott discussed a brief incident between them where Scott,
as part of motu-release was holding-up uploads for notification changes
that James wanted to do. All parties agreed there was little to discuss
about this in a MOTU meeting.

== Python Transition ==

Scott said that the main issue here was the lateness of the change, 
despite everyone knowing that it was coming. In addition it was felt
that the transition wasn't co-ordinated well, and there was a lack
of information about the issues and the fixes.

Suggestions for improving the next python transition were:

  * Get the change uploaded as early as possible
  * Not making a new python the default in the same release it is 
    introduced.
  * Draft a companion spec about transitioning the modules/applications,
    including information on what changes are needed, how to find the
    packages that need changing, specific things to test, ways to raise
    issues caused by the transition with the developers.

James suggested creating a document on "Best practices for transitions",
but there was little interest shown.

== Multiply-Versioned Libraries ==

(Library packages that have different versions in different source 
packages, rather than more typical organisation)

Scott suggested that working with main and defining targets for these
libraries would be useful: choosing a desired version, and any versions
to drop, and then attempting to make the necessary changes across the
archive.

The only two candidates anyone could list were boost and libdb, so it
was suggested starting by listing all such packages in a wiki page would
be useful. James suggested that a meeting could be arranged at the
start of each cycle to look at the list and choose targets.

== Date of Final Freeze ==

Scott said that he thought the final freeze for universe could be much 
later. He said that he would take this up with ubuntu-release at UDS.

== REVU and new packages ==

Nathan said that he was pleased with the REVU days that Siegfried had
organised, and that he intended to continue these.

Nathan also talked about a proposal that had been discussed for a new 
interface to REVU that would lead to a changed workflow.

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/REVUWorkflowProposal

After some explanation of the proposal it was decided that the proposal
was at a stage where a discussion on the mailing list to attempt to
gather consensus for the change would be more valuable. Nathan said that
he would try to coordinate to get the ball rolling again.

Siegfried also asked whether anyone thought it would be worthwhile to 
have uploads processed as soon as they are finished, rather than by
a cron job that runs every 3 minutes. Most people thought the existing
system was frequent enough.

The meeting finished with a brief discussion of the merits of building
the source packages on REVU, but was cut short by the start of the next
meeting.


Thanks,

James