Re: usefulness of ITPs (Re: mosh ITP not done, just package name taken over)
"Eugene V. Lyubimkin" <jackyf@debian.org> writes:
> I disagree almost completely.
>
> On 2012-03-25 16:00, Joey Hess wrote:
>> But still nothing. ITP is more often than not a pointless bureaucracy.
>
> No, it's not nothing, and it's not a pointless bureaucracy. Filing an
> ITP shows your intent to a hundreds of developers, which is:
>
> a) useful for the ITP owner since it advertises the package for
> the prospective users;
Since you are supposed to file the ITP before starting on the package
that is pretty useless. It only advertises the existance of the upstream
and that isn't really debians job.
One should rather have an IHP (I Have Packaged) for this or a PPN
(Package Passed New queue). That's when it gets interesting for users.
> b) useful for the Debian project since experienced people may
> immediately point that there are/there were some problems which
> prevented the package to be added before or made the package
> disappear from Debian archives in the past;
> c) useful for the Debian project since experienced people may ask
> the ITP owner why to package the thing at all if they know/suspect
> there are superior things in the archive already;
> d) useful for the Debian project because people sometimes choose
> too confusing/short names for packages, and answering to an ITP
> is usually the only chance for the public to suggest some better
> name before the package entered the archive, after which the renaming
> is more time-consuming and bureaucratic;
> e) useful to prevent a duplicate work.
Pointless if the package is uploaded the moment the BTS responds with
the bug number for the ITP, which was the hypotetical.
>> The turnaround time for packaging the average package is less than the
>> turnaround time in getting back a ITP bug number.
>
> I very doubt that. I even have a doubt that there is a single proper
> Debian package for which the time between 'Oh, I will package this' and
> uploading a package to archives takes less than 15 minutes (which a BTS
> turnaround time for me) as there are too many things to write/check
> which require the human attention. But maybe that's me being too slow.
In the simple case:
1) file ITP with the infos you put in debian/control
2) dh_make
3) write debian/control (cut&paste the description, homepage, ... from the ITP)
4) write debian/copyright
5) remove some example files
6) build, test, upload
If you have a BTS turnaround time of 2h then there certainly is enough
time to finish.
MfG
Goswin
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