Multimedia Teams in Debian

[Free Ekanayaka]

Hi,

|--==> On Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:38:11 -0300, Felipe Sateler <fsateler at gmail.com> said:

  FS> 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.

  FS> Hello all. This discussion died without any further action towards merging 
  FS> both teams. I re-brought it up a few days ago at the debian-multimedia 
  FS> list[1], and the general consensus (ie, 2 other people) is that they should 
  FS> be merged. Now, re-reading this particular thread, it seems that the 
  FS> pkg-multimedia team didn't have anything against it. So, lets work out a way 
  FS> to move forward.

Felipe, thanks a lot for your initiative.

As the debian-multimedia list's traffic shows, the Debian Multimedia
team hasn't been quite active lately. It seems that pkg-multimedia-maintainers
is in better shape (at least according in terms of number of posts/bug reports),
maybe because packages like vlc and ffmpeg are very popular and get more feedback
from users, while debian-multimedia focuses on relatively "niche" packages.

The main point of merging the two projects for me would be have a
single project more active and more visible, which can possibly
attract more developers (that's what is needed now by d-m).

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

I agree that "bloating" a list with bug reports and followups can
spoil the "general discussion" attitude, but I also believe that
setting the team's list address as Maintainer and getting reports
there is very useful. If I had to choose I would prefer the dual-list
model.

  FS> I also think that Debian Multimedia Team is a cooler name.

For me too, but I don't care too much of the name, as long as the
project is successful.

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

I would go for git too, d-m has already a repository on
git.debian.org. But I also understand that other maintainers might
want to stick to SVN for various reasons, even simply because they
don't have time to learn/switch to another VCS.

So I would let the "main" maintainers of each particular packages
choose the VCS they prefer.

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

Let's see if there's consensus about it first :)

  FS> Lets hope this gets the ball rolling.

I'm all for it!

Ciao,

Free