On Thursday, August 30, 2012 15:50:42 Alin M Elena wrote:

Dear Andreas,

nice to hear the names of the people in charge of reviewing sr...

almost all the packages that I submitted to the factory, ended up in it via a devel project. and some devel projects are fast and kind in dealing with the srs, other are simple mythical bit buckets... Maybe would be nice to publish a list with devel projects for factory and who is actually supposed to review packages sent to each of them...

I don't have a list, but you can get it for each package yourself. Just run osc maintainer -v openSUSE:Factory $package

on top of that a clarification of devel->factory submit process would be much appreciated... (practical clarification, not conceptual as that is already done in the wiki)

What exactly is not clear? Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger aj@{suse.com,opensuse.org} Twitter/Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GF: Jeff Hawn,Jennifer Guild,Felix Imendörffer,HRB16746 (AG Nürnberg) GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org

On Thursday, August 30, 2012 16:11:09 Alin M Elena wrote:

...

I don't have a list, but you can get it for each package yourself. Just run osc maintainer -v openSUSE:Factory $package

Andreas, what you get there is a mythical list of users... some devel projects simply have no person reacting... This issue was raised previously on the mailing list, iirc... Personally I was in the position in which I submitted packages to a devel package and they simply died... because nobody reviewed the sr...

There is another issue of packages duplicated in between different devel projects...

Yes, those are all things that need to be improved but beyond of what we as team can work on for now. Others helping here would be great.

...

What exactly is not clear?

who is submitting from the devel project to factory... the person who pushed it to devel once accepted or is the responsibility of someone from the devel project.

By default, the webui shows the button: Forward package to factory. It's the job of the maintainer of the package to push it forward. Since some people forgot that in the past, Coolo setup some automatic pushes. Responsiblity is by someone from the devel project. Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger aj@{suse.com,opensuse.org} Twitter/Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GF: Jeff Hawn,Jennifer Guild,Felix Imendörffer,HRB16746 (AG Nürnberg) GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org

Quoting Marguerite Su :

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 10:59 PM, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

We have so many repositories. That's good. but one person can only focus on a few of them. But which one should he focus on at the beginning?

True, that can be confusing. 'New' contributors often do not start with a new package, but with a 'fix'/'update'. For 'this' usecase we have to make sure that it's not important to know the deve project, as osc branch openSUSE:Factory <pkg> works just fine and branches off the devel project. Then, inside the package directoy, "osc sr" without parameters again does the right thing and submits the package back to the devel project. So not documenting all the features a tool has might be a good start for beginners tutorials as well. Dominique -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org

On Thu, 2012-08-30 at 23:59 +0800, Marguerite Su wrote:

On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 11:38 PM, Dominique Leuenberger a.k.a DimStar wrote:

...

'New' contributors often do not start with a new package, but with a 'fix'/'update'.

Actually it's based on an assumption that:

the "new" contributor is coming to fix. to contribute.

Yes, indeed.. that was one assumption formulated; but still, for this user we usually offer a too complex 'toolset', because all our wikis mention 'find the right devel project and branch from there', then use osc sr <devl project> to send it back (have seen many of those.. maybe they are all fixed already...)

the "new" contributor is an openSUSE user who locally configure && make && make install an application. finds that application is so good that he can't help & hold the emotion to have it included in openSUSE Distribution by default.

No doubt a very valid use case which we need to cater for as well. As Factory generally DOES have an exhaustive list of devel projects (submitting from any other project should give an auto-reject), I'm sure this list can be reproduced in Wiki form as well; giving a short description what's the 'main purpose' of any of the devel projects. Is this about in line with what you'd be thinking about? Dominique -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org

On 08/30/2012 05:59 PM, Marguerite Su wrote:

[...] After many trials, he made it in his home. According to the wiki, now he needs to submit it to a devel repository first then Factory. but which?

No dead end - ask! ;) New packages should get introduced on opensuse-factory first and as part of that the submitter can ask what the best devel project would be - and then somebody can volunteer and help if needed, Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger aj@{suse.com,opensuse.org} Twitter/Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GF: Jeff Hawn,Jennifer Guild,Felix Imendörffer,HRB16746 (AG Nürnberg) GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org

On Fri, 31 Aug 2012 08:01:54 +0800 Marguerite Su wrote:

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 3:08 AM, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

...

No dead end - ask! ;) New packages should get introduced on opensuse-factory first and as part of that the submitter can ask what the best devel project would be - and then somebody can volunteer and help if needed,

Sure. but that is what I call "a lot of pain". ... I translated openSUSE into Chinese in two month, 30000+ items. but I can just submit 200 line of KDE translations in a week. ...

In a few years all translations will be in :) How do you count items? Even in lines of text it is huge.

And actually ML and IRC are the successful output of last century. The new generation prefers Instant messaging or social tools. ...

It is about informational capacity of MLs and IRC channels. They are just too slow in reaction to query, and information transfer speed is too low. Without external links you can't even have complex answers with images, diagrams and videos. New generation of Linux users is different type of users then last century Linux fans. Linux fans were technically inclined, often developers, needed only hints to solve problems, and above all they wanted to play with Linux. It is like car user that is hobby, or professional, mechanic in love with its subject. Modern Linux users don't want to know about Linux more then car driver wants to know about car. When they are hit by a problem they want it solved, without learning any bit more how-stuff-works. The only difference between them and Windows, or MAC, users is that they want ability to change oil, or replace broken part, but not farther then that.

I think there're a lot of crying about why we developers don't show up in forums.o.o or twitter.

There is, but it is actually symptom of underlying problems. When advanced users can't help beginners, that means that they are lost in all changes that happen. When they feel lost then they cry for help from those with more knowledge - developers, but then comes in your next paragraph:

If you are only available to help through your mailbox in front of your home yard or the only one telephone in your office. That help nearly means nothing in a so big world.

One developer can answer to one user, not to all that have a problem. It is also unrealistic to expect that developers will do any good if they try to help beginners. The language they speak is full of expressions that they learned after few years of college and few more practice. Translating that to daily language means explaining what those special expressions mean, which will most likely pull in more secondary explanations and finally mount to the unsolvable problem in itself. The only way to solve this is to have communication between developers and halfway educated users, some kind of interest groups, or fandoms, so that there is someone that can actually answer to all users that have a problem, write wiki, make a movie.

Actually you made an assumption that the ones who can offer help is available through ML. The Chinese "team" page in zh.o.o only got 300+ views from we had wiki to now. After I added a gtalk group into it. now its almost 3000+ views.

In short, I mean:

* Human help slows someone down if she's a powerful Google user. * We can't force the potential contributors who never use a ML or IRC in her life before to use that only to find out information which should be documented.

:) Problem is also who is going to write that docs. Example of the problem for systemd. New thing to everybody. Only few of developers understand it. Docs that were written some time ago for unknown version of openSUSE and systemd, appear to be misleading. (Yesterday, on IRC, I was in position to guess what to do with http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Systemd and user that was looking to set up test system to check is his computer ready for update. User could not get systemd running. It was missing some bit somewhere. ) Developer wrote docs once with no notion what they relate to and never updated them. No one else has knowledge to keep docs up to date. What now? It would be not a problem if that is only one subject, but that is how it happens all over the wiki. It is more rule that docs are not checked for validity when revision of underlying software is changed then exception. In other words each developer, or software title, is missing fans that will take care of details, or notify responsible person about changes, so that developer can focus on software development, but docs are updated when needed.

And also, having a layout doesn't compromise the human help but improves it. Because nowadays even maintainers don't know exactly the purpose of every repositories. They need a reference to mention too.

Even if they know, they can't be available 24/7, so reference is must have. If no one is available, at least Google will find it. (Just checked some of http://en.opensuse.org/Special:LonelyPages and Google have them. )

Marguerite

-- Regards, Rajko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Christian Boltz wrote:

This sounds like manual work to me, which also means it will always be outdated. (See also my hand-picked .sig ;-)

Agreed. OBS flag implementation is much better that wiki. But the question is who to implement it? You need to convince that person and if he has time. I can only use the resource I'm familiar with..actually seems I'm the only person thinks it's helpful so far Marguerite -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org