Bug#510415: tech-ctte: Qmail inclusion (or not) in Debian
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).
And in the case of Qmail, the security team said that they have no
probleme supporting it.
> 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 ?
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.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
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