Hello everybody, here are some news about the latest changes made to the Package Tracking System. New derivatives keyword ----------------------- The PTS will be used to relay informations from derivative distributions. Therefore, a new keyword "derivatives" has been implemented. By default, a PTS subscriber won't receive the messages associated to this keyword unless he has already manually activated the "cvs" keyword (i.e. the set of users having the "derivatives" keyword has been initialized as the set of users having the "cvs" keyword because those people can read patches and are most probably interested in them). The Ubuntu distribution will be the first to make use of this new feature. Each time that a new package is uploaded to Ubuntu, the PTS will receive the diff between the new version and the previous one. This way we'll receive regularly small patches instead of having only a big monolithic patch on http://patches.ubuntu.com/ (those will continue to be updated anyway). Those mails will look like this: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-patches/2006-July/thread.html The maintainer can thus subscribe to this specific keyword and be informed when Ubuntu introduces changes to their Debian package. Other derivatives distributions are encouraged to follow this path and to at least make patches available if they don't have the time to properly submit them via the BTS. Feel free to contact me to work out implementation details for the PTS integration. To subscribe to specific keywords only, the simplest is to use the online form on the left colum on each page of the PTS. Just type your email and select "advanced mode". http://packages.qa.debian.org/<srcpackage> Check out the documentation if you want to use the mail bot: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ch-resources.en.html#s-pkg-tracking-system Changing keyword on all subscriptions ------------------------------------- The control bot has been expanded to support new commands to add/remove keyword on all subscriptions. People who are subscribed to packages with the cvs keyword and which do not wish to receive the mails sent to the new "derivatives" keyword can send one of those commands to pts@qa.debian.org to deactivate this last keyword in all their subscriptions: keywordall - derivatives keywordall my-own-email@example.com - derivatives On the contrary people who want to have the "derivatives" keyword on all their subscriptions can use one of those commands: keywordall + derivatives keywordall my-own-email@example.com + derivatives (Of course it also works with the usual keywords) Automatic bounce handling ------------------------- Since I couldn't handle the amount of bounces generated by the BTS, I decided to use VERP and I wrote a bounce handler. You will now get automatically unsubscribed if all the mails sent to you during 3 different days have bounced. This scheme works well to not unsubscribe people rejecting spam that we (unfortunately) relay sometimes via the BTS, but to effectively unsubscribe emails that really stopped working. Help is always needed --------------------- Thanks to Filipo and Jeroen who are helping on a more or less regular basis. More help is always needed, check out the PTS page to find out things to do: http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/pts Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Premier livre français sur Debian GNU/Linux : http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature