Russ Allbery [14/Feb 9:20am -08] wrote: > Tobias Frost <[email protected]> writes: > >> The uploader information remains very valuble. A key problem is that >> there often no information on who is part of a team, assseing if a team >> is functioning well is often hard, whether all (to us unknown) team >> members are already gone -- if the team is actually still teaming… > >> Teams a very hard to assess for the MIA team. I wrote (smaller) teams >> emails as part of MIA work but often did not received any response. >> Being able to adress a *human* is IMHO much more promising of getting >> results - as often they feel more resonsible for their package - than >> talking to a team. > >> Hunting information about no longer active persons is already taking a >> lot of energy and time. Any additional friction in accessing accurate >> information will increases that burden. > > It sounds like this is the root of the issue for you: You rely on > Uploaders to have a sense of who is still active in Debian as part of a > packaging team, and you also use it to find a human contact point to ask > about status. > > Also, presumably you're pretty busy and may not have the time to develop > new tools. > > Is there perhaps something others can do to help you with other sources of > data? The first thing that occurred to me when reading this is that in a > world where team maintenance is increasingly happening on Salsa, Salsa > activity might be a better metric for project activity than uploads or > presence in Uploaders. That would also capture people who do a lot of > merge requests and reviews but don't prepare final uploads. I have no idea > how common that is, but it seems at least plausible. > > Maybe there's some way for someone else to help you pull that data from > Salsa and add it as an input to your process? And then teams that work in > Salsa and can provide that activity information could drop the Uploaders > field because they're providing you with better information? > > The contact point problem remains, of course. Personally, I'd love for > packaging teams to publish a list of individual people who are points of > contact, but I realize that's just one more thing to keep up to date.
Thanks, Tobi, for sharing these details of your work. In teams that would be keen to get rid of the Uploaders field, I think it is probably not serving the function that you think it is. It's simply the name of the first person who uploaded the package. They might not have very much to do with the team at all other than having uploaded that package to NEW. So alternative sources of data for you would probably not only allow us to remove the requirement for the field, but also just be more accurate. -- Sean Whitton
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