Re: Bug#510415: tech-ctte: Qmail inclusion (or not) in Debian
Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, 09 Jan 2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I'm with Steve on this. I think the ftp team review is valuable, and as a
>> project it takes us much more effort to deal with critically buggy
>> packages after they're in the archive than before they get there.
>>
>> All of the teams who have to deal with critically buggy packages once
>> they're in the archive are chronically understaffed.
>
> What are those teams? I can only think of the security team that has a
> duty to support the security of the stable release. And even this team has
> now some (widely unknown) way to say that they don't fully support some
> specific packages (they do that with a specific tag in debtag).
There is the QA Team, the Release Teams and the Security Team at least.
> And in the case of Qmail, the security team said that they have no
> probleme supporting it.
The code might be security supportable, but still not easy to integrate
in a distribution nor have the quality expected to be in a release. I do
think packages which don't qualify for inclusion in the release because
of quality issues should be able to be uploaded to the archive, though
only when there is a high chance that these quality issues (including
integration issues) will be solved.
>> If the packages aren't accepted in the first place, fixing the bugginess
>> is the problem of the person who wants to upload them. After they're
>> accepted into the archive, in practice dealing with it often becomes the
>> problem of a lot of other people who have other critical tasks.
>> Overall, I think an ftp team reject is a fairly good tradeoff unless
>> they're frequently wrong, and I haven't gotten the impression that they
>> are.
>
> Would it make sense to have an "unsupported" dist where packages can
> not be auto-transitioned by the maintainer to sid ?
We have experimental, though there is nothing in effect that prevents a
maintainer to upload experimental packages to unstable atm...
> So that we have a place for such packages without imposing any duty on
> Debian as a whole and so that we leave a real chance for motivated
> maintainer to enhance them within Debian. It would be a bit like the
> "staging" area in the Linux kernel.
Whatever staging area you have within Debian, it will be a suite so FTP
Master will be involved and the QA Team would (should) make sure
unspotted cruft gets noticed...
Cheers
Luk
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