re-vision on the ARB (was: Resigning from the ARB)

[Bhavani Shankar R]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 10:20 PM, Allison Randal <allison at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On 08/14/2012 04:00 PM, Jono Bacon wrote:
>>
>> Despite the best efforts of the ARB, the gatekeeper approach is
>> definitely not working. With this in mind I have been working with
>> some folks to propose a new process for app devs. I will post about it
>> next week when some of the thinking is jotted down.
>
> I've been pondering what my ideal ARB process might look like, and it
> seems to be completely upside down of what we have now. Instead of
> manually verifying that each app meets the policy, we automatically
> verify what we can (which could include /opt path checks and apparmor
> profile checks), and have the system just publish if it passes those
> checks. Make sure we have an easy way for users to report any violations
> or bad effects, and be very responsive to remove offending packages.
>

+1. arb-lint does that job quite well but I have found few nitpicks
while reviewing manually (but arb-lint has reduced the manual work
quite a bit)

Secondly, We can insist on apps having a bug tracker mandatory to
report bugs if any found by users (For lp based app having apport
hooks and crashdb configs would be fine I guess)

> That could break us free of the gatekeeper trap, and give us time to
> work on better automated checks and better automated packaging.
>

+1 here too. Maybe an automatic license checking mechanism integration
in arb-lint would reduce the manual part of review to furthermore
extent I think. (because some of the apps I reviewed had some nitpicks
in d/copyright or when I ran licensecheck)


Regards,

-- 
Bhavani Shankar
Ubuntu Developer       |  www.ubuntu.com
https://launchpad.net/~bhavi