explicit forward-to-debian tags?

Bug #1008449 reported by Jani Monoses
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This bug affects 1 person
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ubuntu-sponsoring
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Bug Description

This may not belong to sponsoring but to LP or other UIs that pop up in the packaging workflow, but some clear indication that a patch is considered better fit for going to Ubuntu via Debian would be helpful.

There are quite a few sponsoring requests that linger because they are too tiny and insignificant (in the whole Ubuntu ecosystem, not to the contributor, for whom it obviously is important) to act on to worth the hassle and the gratuitous delta.

If there were a Tag (although a bug-state or branch-state would be more official sounding) that meant this is thought to be better sent to Debian first, it could be easily searched for in BTS sending sprees (if one is so inclined) and be filtered out from the sponsoring list of substantial patches.

This is less of an UI issue and more process-related, and one with no clear answer - one sends away contributors to make a more significant effort and delay their gratification in the same time by possibly months, but it is being done already I guess, just not very formalized?

A tag is a stronger indicator of action to be taken than a comment in English which is usually not worded very assertively to not discourage the contributor.

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

> but some clear indication that a patch is considered better fit for going to Ubuntu via Debian would be helpful.

How could one programmatically determine that?

It pretty much requires a human Ubuntu developer to come to that decision. Once we've done that, we can unsubscribe sponsors, and it won't appear on the queue any more. Ideally the person who recommended forwarding to debian will be available to help the contributer to do this.

> A tag is a stronger indicator of action to be taken than a comment in English

I can't say I look at bug tags very much, I'm far more likely to notice a comment.

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

While some low-hanging fruit could be programatically determined (eg patch only changes debian/watch as one of the current entries in the queue has) I did not mean the tags to be generated automatically.
Just to replace the current practice of prodding contributors in a comment to send to Debian - which may or may not be heeded - with the practice of flagging with for-debian. Which then can be programatically used to filter out from the view, be searched for, etc. If there is no consensus that a patch is better to go via Debian the tag can be reset easily. But once it is there it should be the equivalent of - please let's come back to the issue once it is in Debian and the BTS tracker linked.

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

If a sponsor decides that a patch should be applied in Debian first, what shoud be done?

a) The sponsor could write a comment telling the contributor to forward the fix to Debian and unsubscribe ubuntu-sponsors. The item will vanish from the queue then.

b) The sponsor could write a comment telling the contributor to forward the fix to Debian and add a forward-to-debian tag to the bug. Then the sponsoring queue will still list the item. In this case the sponsoring queue needs to be modified to put all items with forward-to-debian in a separate table.

What approach is preferred?

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