Automated mails to maintainers of packages with serious problems
Hi,
During my talk today at debconf, I discussed the idea of sending mails
to maintainers of packages with serious problems. The audience
welcomed the idea, so I will send the first mails soon.
You will receive a mail:
* if one of your packages has RC bugs older than 30 days in unstable
* if one of your packages has not been in testing for more than
180 days
* if one of your packages has failed to migrate to testing for more
than 360 days
You will only receive one mail (per e-mail address), listing the
problems in all your packages, not one mail per package. If all your
packages are OK (according to the criterias above), you won't receive
anything.
If you co-maintain packages with problems, you won't receive anything
(the "main" maintainer will), unless a mail is sent to you because of
another package (in that case, it will also include info about
co-maintained packages).
I plan to send such mails on a monthly basis. Depending on how well it
is received, the criterias will be enlarged to include more packages,
while staying reasonable.
The mails will mention:
- an unsubscribe mechanism
- an ignore mechanism, to ignore specific packages
So the annoyance should be minimal: if you don't like it, just
unsubscribe, and you won't receive those mails again.
The main problem is with packages that have dummy RC bugs to prevent
them from migrating to testing (see #395332 for example). Such
packages are difficult to detect, and, for packages that have been in
that case for a long time, one might question if the package should
not be simply removed or uploaded to experimental. But you can simply
ignore that package, so again, the annoyance should be minimal.
With the criterias listed above, 244 mails would be sent, which is
quite a lot. But reviewing some of the individual mails makes me think
that most of them are about real issues.
Any comments before I send the mails? For those interested, the slides
from my talk are available on http://blop.info/bazaar/dc7slides.pdf .
Interesting slides are pages 25-31.
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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