After DebConf7, I started to work with the Debian Perl Group, which I think is an example of how good a packaging group can work. We maintain currently 400+ packages, with a log bug-count (0.11 active bugs per source package says asdfasdf, and it's not like we are a lot of people there.

To be honest, I haven't been too active on the packaging front, but I spent countless hours on tweaking and modifying what I think it's the most important tool for the group success: a script that generates a webpage where you can instantly see the status of every package in the SVN repository.

The great thing about this is that it gives you a visual idea of the status of everything in a moment: which packages have bugs, which one are ready to be uploaded, and —since we keep all watchfiles updated— also which have a new upstream version. Being a group with many non-DDs, it's great that there's no need for maintaining a list of to-be-sponsored packages; we just mark the package as ready to go, and when somebody can do it, reviews and uploads the package. I can hear the cries of people who think that sponsored packages are the incarnation of the devil, but our bugcount backs me :-).

I tell you all of this because, first of all, I'm really glad to be part of a healty group of great people, and secondly, because we are finishing a completely new version of the tool, which was thought from the beggining to be used by other groups. In fact, a lot of debugging has been done by checking that it could process correctly other groups' data (it only works with SVN by now, but that's easily fixable as the code is pretty modular).

You can see the (static) pages I've done while testing, showing the packages from the Collab-maint, Games, Java, KDE and Python-modules teams/groups. If you find a bug, I'd love to hear about it.

So, if you're interested, grab the sources from the repository, and drop in #debian-perl@OFTC if you need help.