Re: Unauthorised activity surrounding tbb package
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 04:48:33PM +0000, Steven Capper wrote:
> Mathieu,
> I'm writing to express my increasing frustration at activities you've
> instigated surrounding the tbb package that I maintain.
>
> Over the Christmas period a bug report was raised:
> #773359 "package tbb_4.2~20140122-4 FTBFS on mips and mipsel"
>
> and answered by yourself:
> "While I do understand the bug severity, our intention with Steve
> Capper was to only support upstream arch."
>
> Whilst I may agree with your sentiments,
Good. :-)
> we have had no discussion
> over #773359; your response is effectively placing words in my mouth
> and I will not tolerate that. To confound matters, I wasn't even CC'ed
> in on the response!
Usually it is expected that the maintainer receives every posting to the
bugs of the package he maintains. So there was no real point to add an
additional CC.
> Then there's:
> #775506 "unblock: tbb/4.2~20140122-4"
> and,
> #775263 "RM: tbb [s390x mips mipsel] -- ANAIS; #768040"
>
> Both of which have been raised without any discussion with me; I am
> the maintainer for tbb!
While policy grants a certain role on maintainers there is no point in
adding exclamation marks to demonstrate any power. Bug #775506 was
filed one month after the original RC bug #773359 was filed and you as
the maintainer did not respond. Matthieu did a lot in the past to work
on the tbb package as NMU so he seems competent and steped in where you
did nothing visible to fix the RC bug in the times of freeze where we do
have low threshold NMUs anyway. Your blame about "no discussion" is not
true as the bug log - where discussion about bugs is happening - shows
perfectly.
> The technical work is hard enough, and I'm new to Debian and am
> learning the ropes still; it is not helpful to keep me in the dark
> over my own package.
The fact that you are still learning could serve as an excuse why you
are not aware about the usual channels of communication. BTW, this "own
package" attitude is a bit old fashioned. There is a general tendendy
to maintain packages in teams in a VCS. I'd recommend to maintain tbb
in collab-maint - specifically if you confirm your learning status.
> I appreciate that you are trying to help, but I cannot maintain this
> package whilst continually looking over my shoulder.
What do you mean by this sentence?
> I welcome help,
> but I must insist that maintainer related tasks surrounding tbb are
> discussed with me before they are instigated.
>
> [ I've CC'ed in debian-devel@lists.debian.org, as this is the second
> time I've had to bring this sort of thing up with you. ].
It was a good idea to CC debian-devel to enable some clarification for
you. In times of freeze anybody is expected to work on RC bugs. Thanks
to Matthieu a bug was fixed after one month silence of the official
maintainer. Probably packages from Matthieu were in danger to be
removed from Debian due to a chain of dependencies and thus he noticed
the problem.
Please be more careful with terms like "unauthorised" and "I will not
tolerate" in the future if you are not doing your work as maintainer
(like responding to RC bugs) in a timely manner. There is no point in
blaming other people who are steping in to do necessary work.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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