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Re: Please notify the maintainers when removing packages



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.

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.

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.

-- 
see shy jo

[1] Unless of course the new release is the only known fix for the bug.

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