Re: Please notify the maintainers when removing packages
On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 05:25:27PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:
> This thread seems like a powerful lot of noise about something any
> maintainer worth his salt would notice in his daily grep-excuses mails.
>
> Sven Luther wrote:
> > Yes, sure. But then again, we only have so much free time, and we
> > prioritize it differently. It happened for me back then, with the
> > active-dvi package. At the time there was a FTBFS bug or something such
> > not really all that problematic, and i knew there was going to be a new
> > upstream release nextly.
>
> You may think that an upcoming new release is an acceptable excuse to
> not fix a FTBFS bug immediatly. Often though, you will be wrong in that
> assumption. Sometimes when some new version of a library is trying to get
> into testing it will be blocked until all packages that use it are
> rebuilt on all arches to use it.
>
> Now consider what happens if your package uses that library, and has a
> FTBFS, and you are off ignoring the bug report waiting for some special
> event before doing an upload. That's right, your package ends up
> blocking the library from testing. This will often result in mails from
> the release manager or a helper, may get MIA tracking looking at you,
> and may result in your package being removed from testing so that the
> library can get in.
Well, consider then the maintainer who has both a library and another
package that depends on nothing and nothing depends on it. Both have RC
bugs or something which would consider them for removal. Which do you
think is more important to work on ? the library or the lone package ?
And i don't think it would be nice to remove the lone package from the
upcoming release, just because i am hard working on the library problem
on which 100+ or so packages are waiting ?
> Current examples of this kind of thing include the new vorbis and
> clanlib libraries and the various packages that are keeping them out of
> testing.
Just remove them all from testing and be done with it.
That said, i really don't see a reason why _not_ to send the package
maintainer a mail saying so. It is elementary courtesy and costs next to
nothing (and i have not yet seen any argument to the contrary).
> So no, I don't think "I'm waiting on a new upstream release/blue
> moon/white christmas" is a good reason to ignore any bug report[1], and
> especially not any release critical bug report. It's just a lame excuse.
But is the 'i am devoting all my free time to this other more serious
problem' also not a good reason to ignore a minor (but RC) bug in a
minor package ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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