What new devs should be doing

In this session a number of different development tasks were discussed and categorised depending on the necessary skills. We decided that the easiest way for us to update tasks like these regularly is in Harvest. To get this updated regularly we need to have scripts which produce JSON output (http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/2010/12/we-need-harvest-data-sources/).

How Mozilla helps programmers find things to do: http://whatcanidoformozilla.org/ [mpt]

Types of tasks:
Classes of bugs/tasks:

Very Easy
    No homepage field. (..)
    no-misc-depends (...)
    spelling-error-in-description (http://lintian.ubuntuwire.org/quantal/tags/spelling-error-in-description.html )
    Invalid brace expansions in Debhelper config files (...)

Easy
    rcbugs (http://qa.ubuntuwire.org/bugs/rcbugs/)
    Cherrypick security fix from Debian.
    Forwarding Ubuntu patches to Debian

Medium
    Apport hooks.
    --- Merges / Syncs ---
    NBSes
    Do SRUs for already fixed bugs. (??) (bugs with a release task (precise) is insufficient
    as you really want ones that are open in precise and fixed in quantal)
    Transition to new versions of compilers/interpreters/debhelpers/etc (GCC 4.7, Java 7,
    dh_python2)
    Disabling HAL support
    Clean up a small neglected package - triage all the bugs, forward, etc. review its
    proposed patches, subscribe to it

Hard
    Porting from upstreams / Bring upstream changes to Ubuntu (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.status_upstream=resolved_upstream&orderby=-id)
    autopkgtests (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/RequiredTests)
    ?? [needs-packaging] bugs
    Adopt orphaned packages in Debian
    neglected ubuntu packages http://people.ubuntuwire.org/~stefanor/ubuntu-neglected-packages/
    Requesting for removal of packages which are depreciated/dead upstream(replacement available)/FTBFS cannot be fixed/etc

Master
    Fix FTBFS for architectures
    neglected merges

Work items:
[dholbach] Fix docs to explain that it's fine to work on 2-3 bugs and then move on to something more complicated: DONE
[dholbach] Publish the lintian-ubuntu-only script somewhere (lp:~dholbach/+junk/lintian-grep): DONE
[dholbach] do a screencast to explain how to grab items from Harvest: POSTPONED
[stefanor] Get unsponsored non-debdiff patches into the sponsoring queue (https://launchpad.net/bugs/782112): TODO
[dholbach] write code to grab ubuntu-only tasks from lintian list for Havest (done and announced on ubuntu-devel - only piece remaining is bug 1081997): DONE
[stefanor] produce Harvest JSON bits for ubuntu-neglected-packages: TODO
[dholbach] file bug on transition tracker (bug 1081651) to produce Harvest JSON output: DONE
[brian-murray] find out if we can have a Harvest bug list for "SRUs which are fixed in dev release: DONE