Re: Contacting Java packaging team

[Pierre Gruet]

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?

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


- timeline of default JDK versions in Debian;

- same for groovy, scala, ...

(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. 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: - 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;

   - 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

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