Multimedia Teams in Debian

[Reinhard Tartler]

Felipe Sateler <fsateler at gmail.com> writes:

> El 23/04/08 06:09 Fabian Greffrath escribió:
>> I believe we could start merging the efforts of both the
>> pkg-multimedia-maintainers and the debian-multimedia groups into one
>> bigger project, although the current scopes of both projects are
>> slightly different. Since this has allready been suggested today, I'd
>> like to hear some other (Hello, team members!) opinions about it.
>
> Hello all. This discussion died without any further action towards merging 
> both teams. I re-brought it up a few days ago at the debian-multimedia 
> list[1], and the general consensus (ie, 2 other people) is that they should 
> be merged. Now, re-reading this particular thread, it seems that the 
> pkg-multimedia team didn't have anything against it. So, lets work out a way 
> to move forward.

Yes, I still have that thread 'ticked', but I have to admit that I was
too busy/lazy to actually answer it. Sorry for that.

Let me please think aloud. I'm currently looking at the package lists:

http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=debian-multimedia@lists.debian.org
http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-multimedia-maintainers@lists.alioth.debian.org

both are pretty impressive lists. I think I didn't even touch half the
packages of pkg-multimedia, and didn't even really look inside the
packages of debian-multimedia. Furthermore I have to admit that in the
past, I've mainly cared for ffmpeg and sponsored from time to time
people from pkg-multimedia.

To me at least the pkg-multimedia team is a bit similar to the Debian QA
Team. There is a pool of packages that are cared for by interested
people. In the pkg-multimedia team, I don't think we have maintained a
list with 'active' team members, but more or less 'hoped' that bugs are
fixed by members of the team that cared. I don't feel there is strong
commitment by the team member for all packages, but the respective
maintainers all have their 'pet' packages.

In the end, what does merging the team mean to me? For me, it is
enlarging the pool of potential people that potentially touch the
package. This doesn't need to be a bad think, but realistically, we could
have the same with using the alioth 'collab-maint' "project", no?

Still having a (common) dedicated multimedia maintainer's team would
group a set of people interested in a set of related packages.  I think
this is a desirable goal.


> First of all, the bikeshed :) : which list and name to use. It was suggested 
> that debian-multimedia be kept as a discussion list about multimedia in 
> debian, and pkg-multimedia for the maintainership of packages. While it 
> sounds nice at first, I think it doesn't make much sense. At least nobody has 
> been using any of both lists for that purpose. I think it should be better if 
> only one list would be kept. I'm not sure what kind of "general" discussion 
> was expected in the d-m list. The kde in debian lists (which follow this 
> dual-list model) show that the "general discussion" one ended up pretty much 
> dead. I also think that Debian Multimedia Team is a cooler name.

I disagree. The Debian Games Team follow the same dual-list approach. It
turns out that the pkg- list, that listed in the maintainer field is
pretty crowded with bug mail, while the "general discussion" list is
pretty much well used for general discussion.

I think the same could work with the "common" multimedia team as well:

debian-multimedia at lists.debian.org: "General Discussion"
pkg-multimedia-maint at lists.alith.debian.org: "bug flow, etc"

However, I wouldn't mind if the pkg-multimedia-maint list would set a
Mail-Follow-Up to header to debian-multimedia@ in order to focus
discussion.

> Second, VCS coordination. From what I can see, pkg-multimedia uses svn. d-m 
> also uses svn, but is slowly moving towards git. Is there any interest in the 
> p-m people to move to git? I fear that there is no interest in d-m to move 
> back so svn (am I right in this?). My personal choice would be git, FWIW.

I'm not that happy with svn either, but when Sam founded pkg-multimedia,
he told me he has chosen svn because that would attract most people as
svn is the common denominator most people understand. I don't disagree
with him here. But I also think that this plan didn't work out too
well. In effect I think we don't have more than 4, perhaps 5 people that
are actually doing work in pkg-multimedia, and I would be surprised if
more than half of these people actually favour svn.

I personally favour bzr. but I think I could perhaps do with git as
well. What I think is way more important than the question which DVCS we
choose is the exact method we use for maintaining the package. I've
given that matter some thought and even wrote a wiki page about that:

http://wiki.tauware.de/misc:vcs-packaging
http://wiki.tauware.de/misc:vcs-packaging2

Moreover various people have explained their details on how to handle
patches with a DVCS, and with git in particular. The nice thing about
svn here is that you don't have that much choice (because svn does not
offer similar features at all) and discussion on that is avoided. So if
we want to move to git, we must document very carefully the exact way
how to use to tool git.

> Administrative merging of the teams (ie, removing demudi or pkg-multimedia 
> from alioth to use only one) should be done at least right after squeeze 
> (since packages in lenny will point to both places).

Agreed.


As a side note, I think we have 2 special packages in pkg-multimedia,
namely ffmpeg-debian/ffmpeg and vlc. I think we should somehow make it
clear that they are special. However that should not be the main concern
for the matter of this discussion, I just wanted to point out that they
are special maintenance wise.


-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4