Re: Contacting Java packaging team

Pierre Gruet <[email protected]> Sun, 16 Jun 2024 14:11:15 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.java
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hi Andreas,

And thanks for contacting us.

All thoughts below are personal and I hope some others will come up.

Le 12/06/2024 à 17:27, Andreas Tille a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
[...]
> 
> I have some specific questions to the Java packaging team.
> 
>    - Do you feel good when doing your work in Java packaging team?

Sure. Teammates are always helpful!

>    - Do you consider the workload of your team equally shared amongst its
>      members?

(Disclaimer: I am never on IRC so I really might be missing things from 
there.)

Hard to say, my feeling is we in the team are not sharing a 
well-established common goal, and for this reason "workload" is hard to 
define.

Surely some team members have precise goals in mind, but I don't.

My feeling: some coordination among us (e.g. through periodic BoF?) 
would be really useful. We could discuss big issues and directions for 
the team, for instance:
- timeline of default JDK versions in Debian;
- the gradle issue: we are stuck with an old version because we miss big 
dependencies of newest versions, thus we have to patch more and more 
heavily the upstream build.gradle files in order to be able to build 
against our old gradle... I know a lot of efforts have been made about 
this, including some years ago by the Android team. But I cannot say if 
getting a newer gradle is an unreachable goal or if coordination could help;
- same for groovy, scala, ...

>    - Do you have some strategy to gather new contributors for your team?

Not that I am aware of.

>    - Can you give some individual estimation how many hours per week you
>      are working on your tasks in youre team?  Does this fit the amount of
>      time you can really afford for this task?

I would say 1 hour per week on average, but it also depends on Java 
needs I may have from packages in other packaging teams.

>    - In my packaging work I frequently contacted Java packaging team and
>      usually got help very quickly - thanks a lot for this.  The only
>      thing I was not happy about is the fact that the team decided to make
>      the usage of Salsa CI extra hard.  I've contacted the Salsa CI team
>      before and explicitly asked about this policy.  They do not understand
>      and recommend to run Salsa CI as default but by no means even hide
>      the button to switch it on.  Would you mind changing your policy about
>      this?

Another thing we could discuss in the team as I am not aware of this issue.

>    - Can I do anything for you?

Your email is already important. If others raise their voices, maybe 
other ideas could come.

> 
> 
> Kind regards and thanks a lot for your work
>     Andreas.
> 

Thanks again for your interest,

-- 
Pierre
OpenPGP_signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)