I've thought about moving away from the NM templates for almost a year now, so after discussing some basic ideas in winter, I started to do something about it a few months back and decided to try my ideas out with
Hanna Wallach. As Hanna is a busy person, we haven't done very much until now, but I'll hope this will change in the next weeks. This weekend, I also got
Russ Allbery to try this out with me, so I now have 2 applicants to test stuff with.
My basic idea is to look at the current templates, group questions about the same topic and the replace them by actual tasks (like bug triage, QA work, ...) This works fairly well for P&P and leaves only the licensing stuff and 5 or 6 other questions.
The T&S checks are a bit more complicated, as they deal with stuff developers should know, but often don't need to handle in the package they maintain while going through NM. Examples for this are the evil sysv-rc question, "dpkg doesn't support versioned Provides, list workarounds" and the infamous C/C++ library packaging questions [which I only answered partially in my NM process, together with a promise to never do library packaging].
I'm not quite sure how I'll handle those, but the best way is probably to search for a fitting bug and ask the applicant to fix it (or stay with the questions). I'm open for suggestions, so if you have good idea, mail me.
Anyway, I'm quite anxious to see how this works out - It sure is more work for the AM, but on the other hand, it's much more motivating than reading the usual, "interesting" answers. The advantages are easy to list: More fun for the applicant, big chunks of QA work done by NMs and perhaps more interest in Debian in general.
