On Fri, 2020-08-28 at 22:45 +0200, Stasiek Michalski wrote:
On Fri, Aug 28, 2020 at 17:50, Lubos Kocman <lubos.kocman@suse.com> wrote:
**I'd also like to know what would be the personal recommendation for the next steps of both candidates for the openSUSE Board since voting is still open.**
I already briefly discussed this with Adrien, because he had an issue with sending the initial email on the mailing lists and reached out to a few heroes to resolve it. This topic also already partially came up when we had a software-o-o workshop on oSC 19. The solutions we discussed then were more related to fixing the issue of packages being in home projects rather than official repositories, or packages being outdated, and users being able to learn of any outstanding issues of certain packages, using community-submitted comments. It might also be relevant to my ongoing work to migrate openSUSE Forums to Discourse.
The discussion identified two problems that we'd like to address:
* I'm new to openSUSE and I want to help. What are the packages that currently need help and how can I start contributing? There is currently not a single source of truth for such information.
This needs improvements to Bugzilla. Bugzilla needs to know OBS's packages, and allow to map one with the other. A thing similar to this (although connected to koji and not OBS afaik) is already a part of RH Bugzilla.
(Speaking about RHEL not Fedora) The RH bugzilla component list was maintained manually by rel-eng (a script that consumes bugzilla components) and then later was taking over by a new package process for RHEL. Well defined new package process in openSUSE would already help. Especially if we'd define maintainer and he could say/check how much time is he willing to invest on the maintainership.
- Neal mentioned that Fedora is trying to address the issue with some sort of Developer dashboard that displays over the health of packages where users can identify packages in a bad shape.
Currently probably the only thing that can be addressed by such a dashboard in openSUSE distros is outdated versions of the packages, that's very important, but I don't think we need a dashboard for it. Just sending an email, notifying with OBS or Bugzilla bug in some way would be a huge improvement over the status quo. There was somebody implementing release-monitoring support into OBS, but idk where that ended up. We also already have a dashboard for rpmlint on https://rpmlint.opensuse.org/
- I did mention the current bug smashing effort which is still blocked on the agreed bug handling policy. https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/ReleaseEngineering-bug-smashing-ideas-202008... People could proactively come to a session (20 minutes twice a week) and volunteer to work on outstanding bugs.
The second issue is related to the same problem which is the health of packages.
* I'm an existing user and nobody is looking at my submit requests for specific packages. I can't be easily set as a maintainer as I'm not a maintainer of related devel project. I want to help but I'm stuck
Why is that a blocker? IMO giving maintainership to anyone that wants it makes a lot of sense. It could be a good idea to clean up inactive maintainers as well, since that makes it more obvious who to reach out to.
- How do we ensure that outstanding maintainership (either packages or devel projects) are processed? Can we gamify the topic to motivate people to actively contribute? E.g. Libreoffice Badges*?
- Something like LibreOffice badges would also help with the recognition of people who participated in Leap releases or were highlighted as part of release retrospective. See my recent post on opensuse-marketing@
Gamification of anything and everything around us is already dangerous enough, we really don't need to contribute to the problem any further.
LCP [Stasiek] https://lcp.world
-- -- Best regards Luboš Kocman Release Manager openSUSE Leap SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Maxfeldstr. 5 90409 Nuremberg Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Managing Director: Felix Imendörffer