Re: testing and no release schedule
Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> writes:
> On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 11:34:11PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 12:49:55PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > > I'm not concerned about "very important" packages like Gimp. I'm more
> > > concerned about one package here and one package there like users are
> > > asking "Why is gnuchess not in Debian 3.0?".
> >
> > I can't say I'm particularly impressed at not being able to find an
> > explicit answer to that; but the simplest explanation is that Bug#102449
> > didn't get fixed for ten months (two months as RC), and the fix didn't
> > get uploaded to unstable in time before the "zero kelvin" freeze began.
> > I can't see an obvious reason why the fix didn't get in, though there
> > were two security holes discovered later (Bug#162701 and Bug#163757),
> > and there was a relatively severe usability bug discovered within a week
> > or so of the "fixed" version's upload, that didn't get fixed for five
> > and a half months. I don't think I knew about either of the first two
> > bugs, and don't see why I would've considered the other bug RC, though;
> > it's possible the lack of gnuchess was accidental.
> >...
>
> How are such accidents avoided today?
Just for the record, as the current gnuchess maintainer: The main
reason behind all that was that Martin Mitchell, the gnuchess
maintainer at that time, did not give a damn about any of his
packages. In addition to that he refused to give them away and did not
acknowledge NMUs. At the time of the woody freeze gnuchess was in a
terrible state, and I am actually happy that the broken version at
that time did not get released. However, there were patches for all
the bugs, and eventually I NMU-ed and then later hijacked the package,
but it was too late for woody. I guess such accidents can still happen
when packages have MIA maintainers and there is not sufficient general
interest in them. (I was interested, but I was not a DD at the time,
and it took lots of time, energy and unanswered emails until I dared
to ask for a sponsored NMU, especially because I could not really find
any policy on how deal with MIA maintainers who cling to their package
despite not doing any work on them.) I am pretty sure that gnuchess
would have made it into woody if the maintainer had had only a tiny
bit of interest in it.
Lukas
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