Re: Bug#658341: upload of multi-arch enabled dpkg (in time for wheezy)
On Thu, 2012-02-02 at 10:08:13 +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> I hereby submit to your attention the "dpkg multi-arch conflict".
> I believe the issue is well-known, so I describe it only briefly below;
> feel free to ask if you need more information.
*Siiiiiiiiiight*...
> A multi-arch [1] enabled version of dpkg has been available for quite a
> while. Its inclusion in the archive has been one of the early Wheezy
> release goals. Since many months now, the upload of such a version of
> dpkg has been held back due to repeated NACK-s by one of the dpkg
> co-maintainers (Guillem Jover, Cc-ed), based on his desire to do a full
> code review of the multi-arch implementation, which has written by the
> other dpkg co-maintainer (Raphael Hertzog, Cc-ed as well).
>
> [1] http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/MultiArch
>
> The desire to do a full code review is good, but Guillem doesn't seem to
> be able to complete the review in a reasonable time frame.
Obviously part of this delay is my fault as the active blocking agent,
the one maintaining its C code base, but the trigger has been internal
working style discrepancies between Raphaël and me, which we have
discussed privately several times, and for which I don't feel it's
appropriate to talk about here, at this time.
> Since many months now, the delay of the upload is a cause of worry for
> the release team [2] and other project members. The situation has
> escalated to the point that another developer (Cyril Brulebois) has
> done a dpkg NMU a couple of days ago [3]; the NMU has been promptly
> reverted by Guillem [4].
I found Cyril's attitude, and one of the release-team mails to be
extremely annoying, coming up with demands and threats, instead of
possible disscussion and proposals. I think I might have been amenable
to a possible upload to experimental, if approached reasonably, which
I don't remember anyone doing at any point? if for example explicit and
clear notice would have been given about the implementation to possibly
still change before an upload to unstable.
During all this time, people has been saying how the code base was fine
and ready for mergeing, and trying to rush things out, but I've not seen
any of those people do any kind of code review at *all*? when it has been
demonstrated subsequently that the code had issues, bugs and more
importantly at that design ones. Obviously that those reviews would have
been more useful than the continuous complains, would only depend on their
quality, but I'd expect them to be way more useful in any possible way.
> As DPL, I'm worried about two aspects of this issue:
>
> a) The risk of legitimating the fact that by not acting a developer can
> block indefinitely the work of other developers (and possibly of the
> entire project when working on a rather far reaching release goal);
> I've elaborated more on this subject 3 months ago in [5].
>
> [5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2011/10/msg00060.html
Not acting!? I can accept not acting fast enough as people might like,
but not the former. I hate to have to do this, and to be honest I find
it petty, but my acting can be seen here, obviously not all related to
multi-arch, but quite many have been, just not in an obvious way:
<http://dpkg.alioth.debian.org/stats/>
In any case I disagree with most of what is written on that mail, and
it's one of the reasons that has made me sad about the direction Debian
is taking.
> b) The risk of a negative impact on project morale if---due to the
> reason above rather than a legitimate technical reason---we will miss
> the Wheezy multi-arch release goal.
Er, wow, I thought it was clear enough, given my review findings that
there's technical reasons why the branch was and is not ok...
In any case a multi-arch enabled dpkg will not miss wheezy. But I have
kept finding extremely annoying, demotivating and a drain of fun at
various times when working on Debian for the past last year or so...
regards,
guillem
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