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0-day NMUs for RC bugs without activity for 7 days?



Hi,

In <http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/03/msg00016.html>,
the release team writes:

> 0-day NMU policy
> ----------------
> For some time now, we have had a perpetual 0-day NMU policy, and some
> discussion [LDO:0day] was had a while ago. We feel that this has worked
> well for the past five years, and so will be submitting a bug against
> dev-ref to make this official.
> 
> For avoidance of doubt, this means that RC bugs that are older than one
> week that haven't had maintainer activity on it for a week can be
> uploaded to DELAYED/0-day. This means that patches must still make their
> way to the BTS, and the usual workflow must still follow. Also, to quote
> Adeodato Simó:
> [...]

The developers reference[1] currently contains:
> Unless you have an excellent reason not to do so, you must then give some time
> to the maintainer to react (for example, by uploading to the DELAYED queue).
> Here are some recommended values to use for delays:
> 
> - Upload fixing only release-critical bugs older than 7 days: 2 days
> 
> - Upload fixing only release-critical and important bugs: 5 days
> 
> - Other NMUs: 10 days
> 
> Those delays are only examples. In some cases, such as uploads fixing security
> issues, or fixes for trivial bugs that blocking a transition, it is desirable
> that the fixed package reaches unstable sooner.
> 
> Sometimes, release managers decide to allow NMUs with shorter delays for a
> subset of bugs (e.g release-critical bugs older than 7 days). Also, some
> maintainers list themselves in the Low Threshold NMU list, and accept that NMUs
> are uploaded without delay. But even in those cases, it's still a good idea to
> give the maintainer a few days to react before you upload, especially if the
> patch wasn't available in the BTS before, or if you know that the maintainer is
> generally active.

[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#nmu

A patch was proposed (#625449) to implement in dvelopers-reference the
"DELAYED/0 for upload fixing only release-critical bugs older than 7 days,
without maintainer activity for 7 days" policy.


I don't think that this policy is a good idea. But, since I was one of the
drivers of the DEP that resulted in the current NMU policy
(http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep1.html), I'm a bit biased, and I thought I would
bring this proposed change to the attention of -devel@, so that we can get more
feedback.

Reasons for which I am against the change:
- In addition to giving some time to the maintainer to react, the 2-days delay
  also gives a chance to debian-bugs-rc@ readers to review the diff.

- The dev-ref documents the "default" choice. While there are cases where I
  agree that uploading the fixed package ASAP is necessary, in most cases, we
  can probably survive two more days with the bug, if we already survived more
  than 7 days.

- Doing an NMU without trying to contact the maintainer beforehand could be
  considered an aggressive behaviour, or a way to "punish" the maintainer for
  not addressing bugs as fast as one would like. We are trying hard to fight
  the feeling that NMUs are an aggression, this could be counter-productive.

- I don't think that it documents the current practice. Looking at the archives
  of debian-bugs-rc@ in 2010, there are 390 mentions of "DELAYED/2", vs 711
  mentions of "DELAYED", so uploading to DELAYED/2 looks quite popular.

- Developers could be tempted to "ping" their RC bug reports every 7 days to
  ensure that someone would not NMU their packages without prior notices. With
  1815 open RC bugs, this could add some noise ;)

Lucas


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