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

[Fabrice Coutadeur]

Hi,

I'm not going to UDS either, but I wanted to share some thoughts about
the MOTU team with you:
I think that MOTU has still a great role to play in keeping the
Unseeded part of the archive in a good shape, to ensure that the less
looked part of Ubuntu is still usable. There are a lot of people that
depends and uses unseeded applications  and this is also part of
Ubuntu.
In that sense, I see MOTU more like a kind of 'QA' team than 'developpers'.

My only concern is about new comers: we are loosing people because of
real life events (I'm less active than before because of that) and I
don't feel like we are able to replace them.
I first came to Ubuntu because I wanted an app to be packaged for
Ubuntu and I thought that the right way was to help first with other
packages to get some credibility before having it uploaded.
Now, the 'recommended' path is to go thru Debian, meaning that we
redirect possible new contributors to Debian. I know that having
people just dropping some random application in Ubuntu without
maintaining it afterward is not good either, but I feel like we are
loosing some possible direct contributors that way.

My 2 cts.

Fabrice

2012/5/3 Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com>:
> 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
>
>
>
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