web/deps/dep2.mdwn

[[!meta title="DEP-2: Debian Package Maintenance Hub"]]

    Title: Debian Package Maintenance Hub
    DEP: 2
    State: DRAFT
    Date: 2012-01-13
    Drivers: Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>
    URL: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep2
    Abstract:
     Debian maintainers rely on a multitude of services (DDPO, PTS,
     DDPO-by-mail, BTS, etc), and information sources, in order to do
     their job. The flow of information varies greatly from case to case.
     .
     This proposal is about creating a central infrastructure
     that would consolidate several of those services and that would
     standardize the information flow.


Rationale
---------
This new package maintenance infrastructure is needed:

 * to fix long standing problems;
 * to provide a clean base to implement new features:
   * that will help maintainers do a better job;
   * that will help packaging teams to organize themselves;
   * that will help the QA team to ensure that all Debian packages are
     well maintained.

### Problems to solve

#### Maintainer vs Uploader

The flow of information is not the same depending on whether you're
listed in the Maintainer field (in which case most services mail you
directly) or not (in which case you're supposed to subscribe via the PTS
or via a dedicated mailing list). But the opposite is true as well, some
information is only available via the PTS and many maintainers have to
subscribe to the PTS while excluding almost everything just to get
the information they want.

See also [#507288](http://bugs.debian.org/507288) for some more
discussions on this topic.

This makes it very painful to change/switch the Maintainer field because
people have to update their PTS subscriptions accordingly.

#### Duplication of work / inconsistency between the DDPO and the PTS

The DDPO and the PTS are completely separate services. This leads to
duplication of work when a new information needs to be made available in
their respective interface. It can also lead to inconsistencies between
both services when bug occurs or when different choices are made.

#### Mailing lists as Maintainer

We often have mailing lists listed in the Maintainer field and it's not
clear who are the real package maintainers and how many of them there are.
The Uploaders field is often outdated, and/or is just a representation of
who worked last on the package instead of who feels responsible for the
package.

### Goals

#### Provide a working replacement for DDPO/PTS

Since the service aims to merge the DDPO and the PTS, it must be a working
replacement of both services and its set of features must englobe the
features of the actual services.

#### Replace maintenance mailing lists

Packaging teams often separate the mailing list that gets the bug traffic and
other notifications from their main discussion mailing list. This new
infrastructure should entirely replace the former kind of mailing lists.
Anybody receiving notifications and information directed to the package
maintainer should get them via this new infrastructure.

It allows us to know how many people are notified for a given problem.
If nobody is notified, the package is effectively orphaned. A more
interesting case to detect is when several persons are being notified but
all of them are MIA or marked as not being available for Debian (busy/in
vacation).

#### Keep track of the list of maintainers

Packages using this infrastructure should automatically keep track
of the list of their maintainers because anyone subscribing to a package
must pick a "role":
- "maintainer" (only DD can select this role, or DM for their own packages)
- "contributor"
- "follower" (aka lurker)

#### Replace WNPP's RFH, RFA, O

Since the infrastructure already stores the information about who is
maintaining what, it only makes sense to extend it to provide the
list of orphaned packages (i.e. packages without maintainers).

RFH should be replaced by a system where the help request is better
formalized so that we can better direct new contributors in places
where their skills would be well used. Instead of just requesting
help, you could request:
- a new maintainer (to replace you, i.e. RFA)
- a supplementary co-maintainer
- a bug triager
- a C/Python/Perl/… programmer (you should be able to choose the programming
  language)

Each request also documents whether there's an associated offer of
"mentorship" associated to the help request. Of course, there would
also be a free form description to give more details about what's
expected.

#### Replace the LowThresholdNmu list

The [LowThresholdNmu](http://wiki.debian.org/LowThresholdNmu) wiki page
is a hack to let people know when NMU are welcome and not frowned
upon. This information should be properly stored in the database
and it should be associated to each package.

#### Enable new interactions with maintainers

The central role of this new "communication infrastructure" makes it
possible to design new interactions with maintainers. Instead of being
only a source of information, the infrastructure could be used to query
package maintainers and/or let them provide supplementary information.

This could be used to improve the MIA tracking process.

This infrastructure would also be a more natural place to store the
"available for Debian work" boolean flag ("vacation") that's currently
never used because it's buried in db.debian.org and that it's not
practical to update it.

This infrastructure could also be used to let maintainers document the
responsibilities that they have agreed to endorse, and describe the
associated commitments. That way it would be easier to detect packages
that cannot be well maintained because the set of maintainers do not cover
all the tasks that must be assumed to have a properly maintained package.

#### Provide new services to packaging teams

Given that this infrastructure would have native support for packaging
teams, it would also be a good place to offer some standardized services
for them.

For example, one of the central tool for teams are their VCS and it can be
useful for teams to be able to monitor the state of their package in the
VCS. The [PET](http://pet.alioth.debian.org/) tool could be adapted,
integrated and made available to all teams by default.

#### Support alternate notification systems

Email is the only official media used to communicate information to
Debian package maintainers. If all the relevant mails are going through
a central service, it's possible to store those emails and to forward
the relevant information by other means (RSS, XMPP, IRC, etc.). Also
new maintainers can then have access to some historic information
that used to be private for no good reasons.


High-level design of the new infrastructure
-------------------------------------------

### Fixing the flow of information

In order to cleanly solve the problem of the information flow, and to get
rid of the hacks made everywhere to send a copy of the mails to the PTS,
packages would be (progressively) modified to indicate
“Maintainer: &lt;source&gt;@pkgmaint.debian.org” in their control file.
The current content of the field would be moved to the “Uploaders” field.

Until all packages have been converted, the PTS would forward copies of
the mails to ensure that the new infrastucture can still be used for all
packages (even those who have not been updated yet).

Using this intermediary address also solves the problem of maintainers who
orphan their packages and are still listed as maintainers in many released
packages.

QUESTION: It would be cleaner if DAK, the BTS, and all relevant services,
could stop sending mails to the Maintainer field, and would instead always
send the mail to the new infrastructure. That way we wouldn't need to
change the Maintainer field and there would be no transition period.

The new infrastructure would then be configured with initial subscriptions
for emails listed in Maintainer fields (except for mailing lists, since
the infrastructure aims to replace them).

### Leveraging UDD

At least the PTS has been parsing Sources/Packages files by itself, as
well as a bunch of other source of information. But many of the most
recent developments have piggy-backed on UDD to retrieve the information
needed, leaving to UDD the responsibility of bringing all the information
in a single place.

This principle should be generalized to avoid duplication of work and to
make sure that all the important information are available in UDD.

But we must make sure that UDD won't become a bottleneck. Either because
we have a local (live?) replicate of the database, or because we have
ensured that our usage of UDD is limited to batch tasks that are not
on the critical path for all the real-time user requests.

### Using a modern framework for web development

DDPO is implemented in PHP. The PTS uses a mix of Perl, Python, XSLT and
shell scripts. While both works very well and are reliable, the diversity
of the tools and the fact that some are not widely known (e.g. XSLT)
seriously limit the set of contributors who are able to hack on all the
parts of the infrastructure.

With a modern framework for web development, we enlarge the set of people
who are able to help us develop and maintain this infrastructure. It also
offers us a proper separation between presentation and code, so that it's
easier to let web designers integrate this service with the general
look&feel of the various Debian websites. On top of this, we get a fully
internationalized website for free.

### API for data export

If the infrastructure is going to have a central role, there will be
requests to extract data out of the system. We should cater for this by
providing a public API (over HTTP) allowing to retrieve all the (public)
information in some standardized manner.

JSON seems to be a good option for data export. It allows other services
to reuse information from the DPMH, and it makes it easy for various
web services to retrieve the information dynamically via Javascript.

### Native support of packaging teams

Any Debian Developer must be able to create a "packaging team" in the
system. Each packaging team has a set of packages that it maintains (or
keeps an eye on). Anyone can "subscribe" to the team and gets (by default)
all correspondance of all packages associated to that team.

The team subscription can be tuned (much like the current PTS subscription)
to receive only a subset of the usual mails. A direct package subscription would
take precedence over a team subscription, thus allowing the user to
exclude some packages from its team subscription (or get more info for
some specific packages where they are particularly interested).


Implementation details
----------------------

Questions:

 * How do we store emails? For how long? (we store all mails except the BTS mails)
 * What language and web framework? (buxy's default choice: Python & Django)
 * How do we authenticate users? And for DD super-powers?
 * [To be completed]

Acronyms
--------

 * DPMH: Debian Package Maintenance Hub (this project)
 * DDPO: [Debian Developer's Packages Overview](http://qa.debian.org/developer.php)
 * PTS: [Package Tracking System](http://packages.qa.debian.org)
 * BTS: [Bug Tracking System](http://bugs.debian.org)
 * UDD: [Ultimate Debian Database](http://udd.debian.org)
 * DD: Debian Developer
 * WNPP: [Work Needing and Prospective Packages](http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/)
 * RFH: Request For Help
 * RFA: Request For Adoption
 * O: Orphaned
 * NMU: Non-Maintainer Upload

Changes
-------

* 2011-01-13: Initial draft by Raphaël Hertzog.
* 2011-01-28: Integrate feedback from debian-qa@lists.debian.org.
1	[[!meta title="DEP-2: Debian Package Maintenance Hub"]]
2
3	Title: Debian Package Maintenance Hub
4	DEP: 2
5	State: DRAFT
6	Date: 2012-01-13
7	Drivers: Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>
8	URL: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep2
9	Abstract:
10	Debian maintainers rely on a multitude of services (DDPO, PTS,
11	DDPO-by-mail, BTS, etc), and information sources, in order to do
12	their job. The flow of information varies greatly from case to case.
13	.
14	This proposal is about creating a central infrastructure
15	that would consolidate several of those services and that would
16	standardize the information flow.
17
18
19	Rationale
20	---------
21	This new package maintenance infrastructure is needed:
22
23	* to fix long standing problems;
24	* to provide a clean base to implement new features:
25	* that will help maintainers do a better job;
26	* that will help packaging teams to organize themselves;
27	* that will help the QA team to ensure that all Debian packages are
28	well maintained.
29
30	### Problems to solve
31
32	#### Maintainer vs Uploader
33
34	The flow of information is not the same depending on whether you're
35	listed in the Maintainer field (in which case most services mail you
36	directly) or not (in which case you're supposed to subscribe via the PTS
37	or via a dedicated mailing list). But the opposite is true as well, some
38	information is only available via the PTS and many maintainers have to
39	subscribe to the PTS while excluding almost everything just to get
40	the information they want.
41
42	See also [#507288](http://bugs.debian.org/507288) for some more
43	discussions on this topic.
44
45	This makes it very painful to change/switch the Maintainer field because
46	people have to update their PTS subscriptions accordingly.
47
48	#### Duplication of work / inconsistency between the DDPO and the PTS
49
50	The DDPO and the PTS are completely separate services. This leads to
51	duplication of work when a new information needs to be made available in
52	their respective interface. It can also lead to inconsistencies between
53	both services when bug occurs or when different choices are made.
54
55	#### Mailing lists as Maintainer
56
57	We often have mailing lists listed in the Maintainer field and it's not
58	clear who are the real package maintainers and how many of them there are.
59	The Uploaders field is often outdated, and/or is just a representation of
60	who worked last on the package instead of who feels responsible for the
61	package.
62
63	### Goals
64
65	#### Provide a working replacement for DDPO/PTS
66
67	Since the service aims to merge the DDPO and the PTS, it must be a working
68	replacement of both services and its set of features must englobe the
69	features of the actual services.
70
71	#### Replace maintenance mailing lists
72
73	Packaging teams often separate the mailing list that gets the bug traffic and
74	other notifications from their main discussion mailing list. This new
75	infrastructure should entirely replace the former kind of mailing lists.
76	Anybody receiving notifications and information directed to the package
77	maintainer should get them via this new infrastructure.
78
79	It allows us to know how many people are notified for a given problem.
80	If nobody is notified, the package is effectively orphaned. A more
81	interesting case to detect is when several persons are being notified but
82	all of them are MIA or marked as not being available for Debian (busy/in
83	vacation).
84
85	#### Keep track of the list of maintainers
86
87	Packages using this infrastructure should automatically keep track
88	of the list of their maintainers because anyone subscribing to a package
89	must pick a "role":
90	- "maintainer" (only DD can select this role, or DM for their own packages)
91	- "contributor"
92	- "follower" (aka lurker)
93
94	#### Replace WNPP's RFH, RFA, O
95
96	Since the infrastructure already stores the information about who is
97	maintaining what, it only makes sense to extend it to provide the
98	list of orphaned packages (i.e. packages without maintainers).
99
100	RFH should be replaced by a system where the help request is better
101	formalized so that we can better direct new contributors in places
102	where their skills would be well used. Instead of just requesting
103	help, you could request:
104	- a new maintainer (to replace you, i.e. RFA)
105	- a supplementary co-maintainer
106	- a bug triager
107	- a C/Python/Perl/… programmer (you should be able to choose the programming
108	language)
109
110	Each request also documents whether there's an associated offer of
111	"mentorship" associated to the help request. Of course, there would
112	also be a free form description to give more details about what's
113	expected.
114
115	#### Replace the LowThresholdNmu list
116
117	The [LowThresholdNmu](http://wiki.debian.org/LowThresholdNmu) wiki page
118	is a hack to let people know when NMU are welcome and not frowned
119	upon. This information should be properly stored in the database
120	and it should be associated to each package.
121
122	#### Enable new interactions with maintainers
123
124	The central role of this new "communication infrastructure" makes it
125	possible to design new interactions with maintainers. Instead of being
126	only a source of information, the infrastructure could be used to query
127	package maintainers and/or let them provide supplementary information.
128
129	This could be used to improve the MIA tracking process.
130
131	This infrastructure would also be a more natural place to store the
132	"available for Debian work" boolean flag ("vacation") that's currently
133	never used because it's buried in db.debian.org and that it's not
134	practical to update it.
135
136	This infrastructure could also be used to let maintainers document the
137	responsibilities that they have agreed to endorse, and describe the
138	associated commitments. That way it would be easier to detect packages
139	that cannot be well maintained because the set of maintainers do not cover
140	all the tasks that must be assumed to have a properly maintained package.
141
142	#### Provide new services to packaging teams
143
144	Given that this infrastructure would have native support for packaging
145	teams, it would also be a good place to offer some standardized services
146	for them.
147
148	For example, one of the central tool for teams are their VCS and it can be
149	useful for teams to be able to monitor the state of their package in the
150	VCS. The [PET](http://pet.alioth.debian.org/) tool could be adapted,
151	integrated and made available to all teams by default.
152
153	#### Support alternate notification systems
154
155	Email is the only official media used to communicate information to
156	Debian package maintainers. If all the relevant mails are going through
157	a central service, it's possible to store those emails and to forward
158	the relevant information by other means (RSS, XMPP, IRC, etc.). Also
159	new maintainers can then have access to some historic information
160	that used to be private for no good reasons.
161
162
163	High-level design of the new infrastructure
164	-------------------------------------------
165
166	### Fixing the flow of information
167
168	In order to cleanly solve the problem of the information flow, and to get
169	rid of the hacks made everywhere to send a copy of the mails to the PTS,
170	packages would be (progressively) modified to indicate
171	“Maintainer: <source>@pkgmaint.debian.org” in their control file.
172	The current content of the field would be moved to the “Uploaders” field.
173
174	Until all packages have been converted, the PTS would forward copies of
175	the mails to ensure that the new infrastucture can still be used for all
176	packages (even those who have not been updated yet).
177
178	Using this intermediary address also solves the problem of maintainers who
179	orphan their packages and are still listed as maintainers in many released
180	packages.
181
182	QUESTION: It would be cleaner if DAK, the BTS, and all relevant services,
183	could stop sending mails to the Maintainer field, and would instead always
184	send the mail to the new infrastructure. That way we wouldn't need to
185	change the Maintainer field and there would be no transition period.
186
187	The new infrastructure would then be configured with initial subscriptions
188	for emails listed in Maintainer fields (except for mailing lists, since
189	the infrastructure aims to replace them).
190
191	### Leveraging UDD
192
193	At least the PTS has been parsing Sources/Packages files by itself, as
194	well as a bunch of other source of information. But many of the most
195	recent developments have piggy-backed on UDD to retrieve the information
196	needed, leaving to UDD the responsibility of bringing all the information
197	in a single place.
198
199	This principle should be generalized to avoid duplication of work and to
200	make sure that all the important information are available in UDD.
201
202	But we must make sure that UDD won't become a bottleneck. Either because
203	we have a local (live?) replicate of the database, or because we have
204	ensured that our usage of UDD is limited to batch tasks that are not
205	on the critical path for all the real-time user requests.
206
207	### Using a modern framework for web development
208
209	DDPO is implemented in PHP. The PTS uses a mix of Perl, Python, XSLT and
210	shell scripts. While both works very well and are reliable, the diversity
211	of the tools and the fact that some are not widely known (e.g. XSLT)
212	seriously limit the set of contributors who are able to hack on all the
213	parts of the infrastructure.
214
215	With a modern framework for web development, we enlarge the set of people
216	who are able to help us develop and maintain this infrastructure. It also
217	offers us a proper separation between presentation and code, so that it's
218	easier to let web designers integrate this service with the general
219	look&feel of the various Debian websites. On top of this, we get a fully
220	internationalized website for free.
221
222	### API for data export
223
224	If the infrastructure is going to have a central role, there will be
225	requests to extract data out of the system. We should cater for this by
226	providing a public API (over HTTP) allowing to retrieve all the (public)
227	information in some standardized manner.
228
229	JSON seems to be a good option for data export. It allows other services
230	to reuse information from the DPMH, and it makes it easy for various
231	web services to retrieve the information dynamically via Javascript.
232
233	### Native support of packaging teams
234
235	Any Debian Developer must be able to create a "packaging team" in the
236	system. Each packaging team has a set of packages that it maintains (or
237	keeps an eye on). Anyone can "subscribe" to the team and gets (by default)
238	all correspondance of all packages associated to that team.
239
240	The team subscription can be tuned (much like the current PTS subscription)
241	to receive only a subset of the usual mails. A direct package subscription would
242	take precedence over a team subscription, thus allowing the user to
243	exclude some packages from its team subscription (or get more info for
244	some specific packages where they are particularly interested).
245
246
247	Implementation details
248	----------------------
249
250	Questions:
251
252	* How do we store emails? For how long? (we store all mails except the BTS mails)
253	* What language and web framework? (buxy's default choice: Python & Django)
254	* How do we authenticate users? And for DD super-powers?
255	* [To be completed]
256
257	Acronyms
258	--------
259
260	* DPMH: Debian Package Maintenance Hub (this project)
261	* DDPO: [Debian Developer's Packages Overview](http://qa.debian.org/developer.php)
262	* PTS: [Package Tracking System](http://packages.qa.debian.org)
263	* BTS: [Bug Tracking System](http://bugs.debian.org)
264	* UDD: [Ultimate Debian Database](http://udd.debian.org)
265	* DD: Debian Developer
266	* WNPP: [Work Needing and Prospective Packages](http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/)
267	* RFH: Request For Help
268	* RFA: Request For Adoption
269	* O: Orphaned
270	* NMU: Non-Maintainer Upload
271
272	Changes
273	-------
274
275	* 2011-01-13: Initial draft by Raphaël Hertzog.
276	* 2011-01-28: Integrate feedback from debian-qa@lists.debian.org.