Re: New maintainer behaviour with NMU and LogJam's hijacking

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Christian" == Christian Surchi <csurchi@debian.org> writes:


    Christian> Ari wrote to me in the end of october to ask me about
    Christian> my intention about logjam packaging. I had an enormous
    Christian> backlog and I could not be able to reply. Then he filed
    Christian> a wishlist bug report (#166993) for the new upstream
    Christian> release for logjam (4.0.0). Upstream web site
    Christian> (http://logjam.danga.com) reports that 4.0.0 is
    Christian> released on 29 Oct 2002.  Bug report was sent on 29 Oct
    Christian> 2002 (!).

    Christian> On 17 Nov 2002 Ari made a NMU for logjam
    Christian> 4.0.0+cvs.2002.11.17 and another one a few days after
    Christian> that date, IIRC, without a note to me.  I was handling
    Christian> bugs for logjam, as you can see in BTS (#165281). Build
    Christian> failure reported by Junichi Uekawa in that bug was
    Christian> actually a libcurl-dev bug (#169654). I reported and
    Christian> maintainer closed with an upload.

So, honestly after reading your message, I'm not quite sure what
you're complaining about.

If you're complaining that the NMU was handled improperly and that the
communication/policy should have been better, then it seems you're
right.  The person performing the NMU has already indicated that they
are sorry they didn't follow policy and so unless you can give
evidence that you think they will continue to fail to follow policy in
future then it seems like an honest mistake.

If you're arguing that the NMU shouldn't have been done then I think I
disagree.  Based on the evidence that you presented, our users and the
free software community were better served by having that package
updated.  And frankly no response from October 29 to mid November
seems like enough time that an NMU is reasonable.  Yes, the NMU should
have been to delayed; yes you should have been contacted.  But other
than your feelings getting hurt, what was the actual harm done to
Debian?

And yes, your feelings getting hurt is a real concern; it sucks to be
a volunteer and to have someone disrespect your work.  But
communication problems do happen and it seems reasonable to treat them
as communications problems and move on with life.