Day: February 11, 2016

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Post-FOSDEM+DevConf.cz plans I’ll never get to

Attending conferences is a good way to get some excitement into helping out. Lots of people trying to improve and make things better. I attended FOSDEM (6000 people) and DevConf.cz (1600 people). As usual, I’ve had various ideas:

  1. Create an imperfect way to automatically create tarballs:
    Over the various years people often asked “why do we still use tarballs”? But moving away from tarballs is not easy so I don’t want to handle that. Instead, I want to take a small part of the idea and get that working. This to save time for maintainers as well as shortening the time needed to make a GNOME release.

    • Make use of build.gnome.org
      Actually have no idea how build.gnome.org works
    • Perform various sanity checks and bail out if something is wrong or not as expected (“make distcheck”)
    • Do NOT try to handle everything
      Not everything is on build.gnome.org; not every branch might be on there. Too bad!
    • Do try to encourage rewarding a proper module (e.g. be a bit strict in the requirements so that those modules get benefits such as automated releases)
    • Find a way to handle NEWS
      We’ll probably want to generate those from commit messages. E.g. NEWS: bla bla bla
    • Probably need to define an expected workflow
  2. Create an extension for having points on Bugzilla
    We used to have this ages ago. Each time I work on Bugzilla I find various gaps. Either bugs, lack of API, etc. I think this might require an major version upgrade of GNOME Bugzilla else I’d need to apply too many workarounds. Still, points have often been requested and it would really help not only GNOME but also Mageia.
  3. Do minimal amount of work to speed up downstream development
    Example: help out Tails and maybe promote them a bit. They requested a keyword on Bugzilla. Super easy to add. Asked them if anything else might be nice but apparently there’s not much.
    Related: for many years I was planning to see how GNOME would be easier to work with. Find the things which might be easy to change and really help someone else.

Very likely I’ll not get to actually doing any of above. It would be nice though!