What do you want MOTU to be in Q, R and S?

[Scott Kitterman]

On Thursday, May 03, 2012 02:59:19 PM Andrew Starr-Bochicchio wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Daniel Holbach
> 
> <daniel.holbach at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > Hello everybody,
> > 
> > with only a week to go until 12.04 is released, it might be a good time
> > to think about what MOTU is to you and what you feel it should be in the
> > next few releases.
> > 
> > This team has been existing for as long as Ubuntu has been around and
> > one thing we've been doing since the early days is: being there for new
> > contributors and bringing them into the fold. In my mind this is (among
> > many others of course) the most important thing MOTU has contributed to
> > Ubuntu.
> > 
> > Not limited to my personal assessment above, I'd still like to hear from
> > you (no matter if you're a MOTU old-timer or a new contributor) is what
> > do you feel we do well and what do you feel we should change?
> 
> A lot of time has gone by with no response to this thread. The silence
> in both this thread and this list in general saddens me a bit. For
> myself, and I imagine for at least some others, the lack of response
> hasn't been because I don't care about the future of the MOTU. It's
> that over the past few cycles the team has dwindled to the point where
> it is hard to see what it even does. Much of this is of course due to
> many of MOTU's traditional responsibilities having been superseeded by
> newer institutions and norms: archive-reorg/package-sets, the
> Developer Membership Board, a stronger emphasis new packages going
> through Debian. A lot of this is "a good thing," but I feel that we've
> lost some of the social cohesion that the team used to bring to Ubuntu
> development. More developers are now scattered about their smaller
> teams focused on their particular package-sets or pluging away alone
> on the few packages they care about.
> 
> As Daniel mentioned, one of the most important contributions of this
> team has been bringing new contributors into the fold. While things
> like per-package upload rights are great for getting contributors with
> a very narrow interest to help directly in Ubuntu, in the past I think
> there was some value to the social pressure to help with package
> outside your specific interest in order to get upload rights. Lowering
> barriers to entry is extremely important and I wouldn't want us to
> move backwards on this, but I wonder if maybe we could come up with
> ideas to assert some sort of positive social pressure (in contrast to
> the negative/restrictive pressure of saying you can't work on what you
> want until you help with other things) for contributors to participate
> in the maintenance of unseeded packages?
> 
> Another place where MOTU was valuable in the past that we seem to be
> missing a bit now was as a kind of catch all team for pursuing random
> bits like the Packaging Guide, training sessions, etc... Maybe these
> things need to be pushed to ~ubuntu-dev? It just seems to me that
> these kinds of things are less and less taking place/being planned in
> public and more so by smaller groups of people.
> 
> One of the last discussions on the future of the MOTU defined the
> team's mission as:
> 
>  * Maintaining packages that do not belong in any package-sets.
>  * Providing guidance and training for new generalist developers.
>  * Extended Quality Assurance functions.

I'm not going to UDS, but I have some thoughts on the matter.

MOTU is still accomplish a lot in getting the archive in shape and fixing 
things for unseeded Universe/Multiverse.  This is mostly done by a small 
number of very productive developers who have been at it for awhile.  I don't 
see a lot of new blood coming in and sticking with MOTU.  

Due to the more fragmented developer model we have now the incentive just 
isn't there for most.  (this is a foreseeable (and FWIW foreseen) consequence 
of archive reorg, packagesets, and relaxed requirements associated with PPU 
permissions.

I did see in the last cycle a few new people start to show up and contribute 
and I think that's great.  We need to build on that.  

Scott K