On Tue, 24 Mar 2009, Anthony Towns wrote: > Over the next twelve months, what single development/activity/project > is going to improve Debian's value the most? By how much? How will > you be involved?
Having such a discussion is really interesting, I would not limit it to -vote and DPL candidates. We should re-raise the topic on -devel and let all contributors share their big plans for the next year. Going further we could even have an IdeaTorrent setup (à la brainstorm.ubuntu.com) where we could all register our projects/ideas/plans for Debian and have other Debian contributors rate the ideas. (We could also have a variant open to all users) http://www.ideatorrent.org My plans/ideas are the following: - Global switch to new source format 3.0 (quilt) + drive DEP3 to standardize the meta-information on debian/patches/* - Goal: uniformize most packages around a single patch management system. This makes it easier to occasional contributors, they can help by learning a single patch management system. - Goal: better collaboration with upstream and other distributions because all Debian-specific changes are in separate patches that will be documented in a standard format (lintian warning will require that). Get rid of undocumented Debian-specific change in .diff.gz. - dpkg-vendor tool that can be used in source packages - Goal: facilitate cooperation with derivatives by having a common source package for multiple distributions - Offer some official interface in dpkg-dev to drive a package build within a VCS (source package created from the VCS directly too). - Goal: making it easier for occasional contributors so that they don't have to learn another *-buildpackage tool each time that they hack on another package. - Create a debian-love desktop application that would handhold users into becoming new contributors. The user would select "contributions scenarios" that are of interest for him and when he has some time to spend on Debian, he would run one of the scenarios suggested by the application ("translate .po file for package X", "try to reproduce bug X", "suggest debtags for package X", "add screenshot for application X") with the help of some wizard-like interface. It would make use of all the information available locally and on the net. You can combine the information that application X is used regularly and the fact that the bug #123 reported against this application (same version as the user!) is tagged unreproducible to ask the user to help reproduce the problem. Possibilities are very broad… - Goal: recruit more contributors, spread knowledge about our processes in a entertaining way, make bug management more effective (tagging bugs unreproducible would drive the attention of more users to increase the chance that someone can reproduce it), etc. - Drive DEP2 to define a system that allows us to monitor more effectively and precisely the maintenance status of all packages. http://lists.debian.org/debian-qa/2008/12/msg00046.html - Goal: ensure we always have up-to-date information on maintenance status of packages so that new contributors can be redirected where their help will be welcome, useful and not ignored. Not sure all of this fit in a single year… I would not mind if someone else would be interested to create the debian-love application. :) Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Contribuez à Debian et gagnez un cahier de l'admin Debian Lenny : http://www.ouaza.com/wp/2009/03/02/contribuer-a-debian-gagner-un-livre/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
