This one time, at band camp, Clint Adams said: > > I just don't agree with this. What bright line is drawn around those > > particular jobs that makes them special? I have special access to the > > Perl repository on Alioth as a member of the pkg-perl team; am I magically > > different? Or am I magically different because I have commit access to > > the lintian repository? Or am a member of the QA team but haven't done > > anything with that access yet due to lack of time? > > If Company X bribes you to break libstat-lsmode-perl, there are roughly > a thousand people that can upload a fix. If Company Y bribes you to > remove all the files from pkg-perl's svn repo, there are dozens of > people who can revert this, and roughly a thousand who can NMU the > relevant perl packages in the meantime. lintian is a similar situation. > If Company Z bribes you to not make QA uploads, no one will notice. > > Now, if you become the release manager, and your employer makes your > compensation contingent on Debian not releasing before February of 2010, > no one can NMU the release. Theoretically, we could replace you, but > we cannot fix the problem directly. Of course we can. Just fix all the RC bugs, make sure testing is fully installable and library transitions are complete, ensure that the quality level is where it should be and that we've reached all of our release blocker goals. Then ask the people who actually do the grunt work of a new release (ftp masters, cd image team, etc) to go to work removing the last few packages that don't play nice and then roll out the release. I say this lightly, as if it's not hard work, but it's not magic stuff here. It's not a role account that is special because it has access to special privileges or knowledge. It's a job about doing a lot of cleanup because we as maintainers can't be bothered to make sure our little playgrounds interoperate with the rest of the distribution until someone pokes us with a stick. None of this is meant to slight you guys doing release work, by the way. I think you guys do a lot of hard work and do it well. It must be nice to be accused of being unethical enough to subvert a release in exchange for substandard wages. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ,''`. Stephen Gran | | : :' : sgran@debian.org | | `. `' Debian user, admin, and developer | | `- http://www.debian.org | -----------------------------------------------------------------
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