(-kernel dropped)
On Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 03:47:43PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:07:43 +0300, Faidon Liambotis <paravoid@debian.org> said:
> > Sune Vuorela wrote:
> >> On 2007-09-12, Faidon Liambotis <paravoid@debian.org> wrote:
> >>> You're not checking for copyright violations or for non-free stuff
> >>> in all other packages.
> > I obviously meant all other *existing* source packages, i.e. all the
> > uploads that don't pass through NEW.
> Can you point me to violations of the DFSG, please?
Just for the record, if other developers are repeatedly adding non-free
stuff to packages in main without due care, it'd be technically plausible
to run those uploads through NEW processing too. But we have lots of
checks to ensure DDs are able to do a good job of sorting out free
and non-free stuff, and the system of expecting updates to be good the
vast majority of the time, filing bugs when they're not, and having them
properly fixed seems superior in every way, so I'd /really/ hope nothing
like that will be necessary.
> I think every maintainer is supposed to be doing this for their
> own packages. Only when we have evidence that the maintainers are not
> doing their job does Joerg have to spend his time doing their job for
> them.
NEW processing is a second chance to catch these and other problems before
they hit the distro; it's not something that can replace maintainers
catching the problems at first pass. It's more like manual retraining of
a spam filter -- you don't want it to be the common case that ftpmaster
reviews licenses anymore than you want most spams to be looked at by a
human. But just as you do want a human checking over at least a selection
of messages and any misclassifications to make sure your spam filter's on
track, if we want our policies on copyrights to be consistent, we want
to be regularly reviewing the copyrights of some sampling of packages,
and we want to pay closer attention to any edge cases where we notice
things aren't going the way we want them to.
ftpmaster samples packages with new names for copyright and other
problems; most of the rest of the time we (ftpmaster, -legal, etc) only
investigate further if there's some evidence there's an actual problem.
At the point where it hits ftpmaster, though, the aim seems to me to
be at least as much to ensure maintainers are doing the checks right
(and consistently throughout Debian) as to do the checks themselves.
Cheers,
aj, who right atm can't think of a much higher compliment than comparing
something to his spam filter
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