Debbugs handling of packages

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hello Guix!

Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net> skribis:

> I see two possible outcomes of establishing an additional “incubator”
> repository: it might fragment our review community as some people will
> try to upstream incubator patches and others handle mailing list
> patches; another outcome is that the incubator never gets accepted by
> reviewers and mentors because it is more work, leading to growing
> parallel infrastructure and second-class code.  Neither of these
> outcomes is desirable in my opinion.

Yeah, I share the same concerns.  The example of external repos that you
gave seems to confirm this.

But like Pjotr said, if people want to have their own package set
somewhere else, that’s also fine.  We’ll just work hard to make sure
there’s no real incentive to do that.  :-)

> Our workflow involving the mailing list is far from perfect.  We had
> further discussions over post-FOSDEM dinner and drinks and there seemed
> to be consensus among the people present (including long time
> contributors, reviewers, and successful mentors) that it would be a
> great improvement to keep track of package contributions in a separate
> Debbugs instance (e.g. one “bug” per package submission).  It gives us a
> way to track the state of things more easily, it accomodates people who
> prefer to use a web browser, it permits us to continue to use email, and
> it doesn’t force yet another account onto submitters.
>
> Admittedly, the web interface that Debbugs comes with is kinda bland and
> hard to use, so a second step would be to develop a better UI frontend
> to Debbugs that would be closer to what people expect from an issue
> tracker.
>
> This was discussed before at
> <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-09/msg00140.html>
> and we could request a separate Debbugs instance for
> “guix-packages@gnu.org” *right now* if we wanted to.
>
> What do other people think about this?

I think we should just go ahead and setup that Debbugs instance like I
said I’d do back in September.  It can only be an improvement over what
we have now anyway.

Objections?

Thanks,
Ludo’.