Tuesday 25 April 2017

Re: Does the backporters team need help?

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 07:08:30PM -0500, Micah Gersten wrote:
> Yes, indeed, the team could use assistance. I was on vacation and am
> catching up on things. I would be happy to start getting more people
> involved starting next week.

I'm speaking as a member of the backporters team here.

The backports process relies on the small and overworked backports team
manually reviewing, uploading and then accepting uploads based on bug
reports which often come from users and require any amount of cajoling
(either back and forth with the reporter or actually doing the work) to
be uploadable.

The process is set up in such a way that there is a specific list of
things that the requests have to contain, a specific set of meanings for
bug statuses and a very onerous amount of testing required for
non-trivial backports. Any or all of these things can be wrong per the
policy, and they all make it very hard for the backporters team to
manage. A new member might manage to triage some percentage of the bugs,
but I suspect that very quickly they would get burned out with the
process like the rest of us.

I think it's proven to be a poor and unworkable process and it should be
fixed to enable more developer autonomy. That said, I don't have a new
proposal to make right now but I would be interested in trying to work
one out.

Cheers,

--
Iain Lane [ iain@orangesquash.org.uk ]
Debian Developer [ laney@debian.org ]
Ubuntu Developer [ laney@ubuntu.com ]