Allow grouping by contributor

Bug #1008441 reported by Jani Monoses
8
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
ubuntu-sponsoring
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

The sponsoring request come from a great variety of people, and the best approaches to interacting with them can also be different.
It would be (for me at least) helpful to easily infer from the main table what type of contributor we are dealing with and allowing to group the results by their identity and other contributor characteristics.
This would have a few advantages I can think of:
1) One could easily start sponsoring a certain person's contributions and have a two-way communication that may turn into a longer lasting sponsoring/mentoring relationship. For new contributors this means usually handing very similar types of patches which would fit well in one working session (eg. .desktop file changes, transitions, etc).

2) It would allow quickly differentiating between experienced developers who do not have upload rights to specific areas or need an extra check from someone, and for these contributors the sponsor can forgo all the welcoming and handholding that a new contributor would appreciate. Also it would show roughly how many people with experience could use an upgrade in their uploading permissions. This differentiation may be inferred from karma but maybe LP does not have enough info to tell number of existing uploads or something more representative of packaging/patching experience.

3) Showing who is a Canonical employee (or regular contributor a public team) would allow most of the time skipping a certain sponsoring entry as those are usually best done by teammates - ex Ubuntu One uploads or Foundation work.

Revision history for this message
Stefano Rivera (stefanor) wrote :

This seems to be a fairly vague proposal.

1. Seems like it could be solved by adding a column that names the uploader of the last patch on the bug, or merge proposer.

2. We don't have a very big developer community. If you sponsor fairly regularly you should know most people in the queue aside from the newcomers / drive-by-contributors. Of course that doesn't scale...
Karma may be useful metric. Highlighting proposals from someone with no ubuntu uploads may also be useful, but I don't know how useful. Personally, I just review everything in the queue, from top to bottom, when I feel like sponsoring.

3. The canonical group isn't visible to non-employees, so this can't be easily determined.

Revision history for this message
Jani Monoses (jani) wrote :

I think the reviewing-from-top-to-bottom is the process that does not scale and leads to too much wasted time. Rather then reading up on full threads realising at the last comments that this is dealt with in some way or not for me for some reason, I'd like to go straight to packages which there's a big chance I can sponsor and not step on others' toes.

The whole approach to let's throw manpower at the sponsoring queue is what is not working and it needs sustained and even growing effort unless there are improvements in the process and the tools. My proposal is maybe vague but we need to change how things work or this remains one of the most boring confusing and least rewarding parts related to Ubuntu development and also one that does not seem to improve with time.

Revision history for this message
Benjamin Drung (bdrung) wrote :

Let's focus on the bug title (allow grouping by contributor) and not on the anticipated advantages. We should add a column "Contributor" that lists the contributor of the patch or merge proposal.

Changed in ubuntu-sponsoring:
status: New → Confirmed
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