Ubuntu Wiki

2012-09-06 Meeting (log):

• Application Review Board (ARB) catchup
  • They are working their way through the queue of applications following the successful App Showdown

  • A lot of activity on the mailing list lately

  • The majority of the apps had received feedback on them, a few of them have been published and I believe the majority of them still needs to be, but they think that's going ok
  • Some new tools have been put in place that help with the review process and many of the App Showdown submissions were cookie-cutter Quickly apps
  • They are uncertain how successful they will be at restaffing the board and think they may have burnt out some of the reviewers they had during the showdown
    • The workload is daunting right now, initial expectation was "no more than 5 hours/week"
    • Without app showdown, their usual submission rate was about 5/week, which was manageable by one person full-time
    • Hopeful that improvements to the ABR process will help, but we are talking 6+ months of development work to get the tools in place
    • dholbach to liaise with TB to get an extension of terms to allow more time to attract nominees

  • Discussed the proposed AppDevUploadProcess

    • Not all members agree 100% with the spec, but are confident they can hit a good agreement for the next 6-month cycle of work
    • Need some work in the direction of automated packaging/sandboxing
    • Initial read its much better than existing one and one part a board member liked was removing manual reviews which were the bottlenecks this showdown
    • Encouraged by the discussion on the ubuntu-devel list. It's lengthy, but the tone is quite healthy
    • One board member expressed that they don't like the opt requirement, it is inconvenient, it does add a challenge, it does make it harder to get that same package into the debian/ubuntu archives, but it's also the only way you can prevent filename clashes reliably
  • Made some suggestions to make the call for ARB nominees a bit more welcoming