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.holb...@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 -- Ubuntu-motu mailing list Ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-motu