[maemo-developers] extras: promotion interface

[From: Niels Breet]

> Hi
Hi Misha,
>
> After quite some time of fighting with myself as well as getting
> encouragement from certain members of this community, I'm humbly offer to
> your attention a first {alpha,beta} release of a manual promotion
> interface.

Thank you for actually turning ideas into code! This really is the first
step to get this moving. As I'm trying to get the extras and extras-devel
reform in to shape, this can help a lot.

[snip]
>
> The interface is available at
>
> https://garage.maemo.org/promoter-beta/interface.py
>
>
This is already a nice start! More ideas below.

[snip]
>
> The release pursues few goals:
> * to have some practical for supporting further discussions about
> infrastructure improvements

I have been talking to some community members to get some opinions about
this interface and how to guarantee some kind of quality packages. Here
are some ideas I have collected. Lets see if we can make a plan out of
those. Let's discuss the ideas here, I will later gather all ideas and
create a wiki page for this. Comments are welcome, of course!

- All upload rights to extras will be revoked, except for a few major
contributors. (Only when everything is in place of course ;)

- All packages should be uploaded to extras-devel by default.

- Packages get promoted through the promotion interface from -devel to
extras.

- A group of well known community members will act as quality control,
they will be able to use the promotion interface. Those members can try
out a package and see if it works correctly. If everything is ok, they can
promote the package. (We need volunteers here!)

- Packages can not only be promoted, but also demoted if they are breaking
things. (With the ability to tell the author why it was demoted)

- All promotions and demotions should be logged to some mailing list to
keep the process as transparent as possible.

> * to see if anything like this would really
> encourage community developers to use central 'extras' repository

We would also need to provide an easier way for developers to upload
packages. If we can make a webinterface where developers can add their
package to the upload/promotion queue, I think we will make uploading to
extras a lot less complicated. (Regular dput uploads would also end up in
this same queue)

We can add this as a first step, auto-builders would be a next step to add.


> Almost forgot to mention.  The script does not really have a project
> page anywhere.  It is also a toy project for me to see how well Bazaar DVCS
> supports my needs (so far, it does well enough), so you can find the code
> at
>
> https://code.launchpad.net/~mishas/+junk/devel-mover
>

Maybe it will be a good idea to create a garage project, so we can have
mailing lists for promotions etc? I think that current code is a big step
in the right direction, although we would need to add more features.

Do you have time to work on this some more? Would you like to get help
from other community members on this code?

> --
> Misha

- Niels