unstable->testing process?

[Geoff O'Callaghan <geoff@starbiz.com.au>]

Hi,

I'm wondering what the process is by which a package is 'promoted' from 
unstable to testing.  Is this just an individual developer decision?

I ask because, for a variety of reasons i'm running 'testing' rather than 
'stable'.  There's a few really annoying known bugs with some packages i'm 
using from 'testing' and they are fixed in 'unstable' when would the updated 
packages make it into 'testing'?

An example is libapache-mod-perl...bug#107100 correctly documents that the 
'testing' version is broken and that you need the one from 'unstable' to fix 
it.  There's a few other similar bugs.  This problem seems to have been 
corrected for around 80 days in unstable, but the package hasn't moved from 
'unstable' to 'testing'.  

Yes, I know I could install the package from unstable.  But that's not the 
point.

Please note - i'm not having a go at anyone in particular - i'm just trying 
to understand how things work...

I apologize if this is something quite well documented, but I couldn't find 
it.

Would it help if there was a '+1' style system for Debian bugs?  That is, a 
registered party can vote for up to 3 bugs to give an indication of where 
effort should be focussed - it's the same sort of system used for the 
development on things like apache, tomcat etc.

Thanks for listening.

Cheers
Geoff