NEW processing during freezes (Was: R 3.0.0 and required rebuilds of all reverse Depends: of R)
[ This is just my personal point of view, not necessarily the one of the FTP Team ]
>> Even if you think there are a few days between the time taken to process
>> NEW for experimental vs NEW for unstable, I've seen no evidence of that
>> and it's not as if a few days are really going to matter. (If it's that
>> critical, find a webhost running Debian and install reprepro.)
>
> A few days? There's stuff there *for months*?
True. But most of the packages that currently are on top of the NEW queue would have introduced transitions if FTP Team blindly had accepted them, and we agreed with Release Team to keep them in the queue to avoid potential breakages, given that at the time we just entered the Wheezy freeze. We sent emails to maintainers to inform them about the reasons behind the delay, and we offered to accept packages targeted to experimental instead. I think this is a good approach. Some other packages are stuck in the queue pending an answer from their maintainers about some concerns FTP Team raised. There's little FTP Team can do other than wait for actions from maintainers.
Since July 1st (first day of Wheezy freeze), we have the following figures:
* 2085 NEW packages received (7.694 per day)
* 1379 were accepted (5.089 per day)
* 213 were rejected (0.786 per day)
* 130 generated comments from FTP Team (0.480 per day)
During the freeze, the number of NEW packages received dropped by a half if compared to the average during active development (about 14,85 packages each day), so the number of actions by the FTP Team (about 13.5 accepts, 1.2 rejects, 0.5 comments each day). The above figures are normal during freezes, both maintainers and FTP Team members are focused on other tasks (releasing Wheezy is, of course, one of them!). Maintainers upload packages more often than FTP Team is willing to process them (about 1,8 packages every day), that explains the recent NEW queue growth.
Just for the record, FTP Team managed to keep the NEW queue around ten packages for more than one year and a half, average processing time was less than two days. Also, FTP Team processed almost two hundred packages just before the freeze to give maintainers a chance to make their packages into Wheezy (and most of them did!).
On the other hand, FTP Team is willing to fast-track NEW packages anytime, if needed. Asking for a pacakge acceptance in #debian-ftp is always worth it, and rarely these requests are not taken into consideration (as it happened for some gcc/clang packages, or GNOME ones). If you need actions from FTP Team, feel free to talk to us and we will be happy to help you.
Cheers,
Luca
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