Ian Jackson wrote...
> I think what is really worrying people is the fear that they might
> miss something, for good reasons, and then find that their work that
> they care about is thrown out of stretch.
>
> It is difficult to address this fear with logical arguments intended
> to demonstrate that "it won't happen to a responsible maintainer",
> because it is so easy to think of scenarios where, at the very least,
> it's hard to be sure that the right things would happen.
For me it's a bit different. If John S.(lacker) Maintainer ignored the
messages about debhelper compat 4 removal for ten and about the
openssl 1.1 transition for seven months, and in January suddenly finds
his packages got kicked out and cannot return for stretch - he had it
coming.
If however Jane R.(esponsible) Maintainer did everything right but did
not realize somebody else's non-action affects her packages as well,
through a build dependency or whatever ... until the "Your package was
removed from testing" e-mail arrives: That's quite a nuisance.
So if I, in Jane's position, could be certain I'll learn about a
pending removal that affects my packages early enough I can avoid this
(by kicking the maintainer or NMU), my concerns were neglectable. A
grace period of just a few days was sufficient. This mechanism is
implemented for install dependencies, but after reading this thread
I'm not sure it exists for other scenarios as well.
> On the other hand, it would be really easy for the Release Team to
> address this fear. All they have to say is that if there is a really
> good excuse (maintainer seriously ill; build-dependency broken and
> maintainer not notified; or whatever), they will be willing to
> consider exceptions.
I guess the Release Team plays tough in the first place so people do
their job *now* instead of asking for exceptions later. I'd call that
wise tactics. The e-thing still might happen if there's really, really
good reason. But creating false hope sends the wrong signal.
Finally, there's a thing called "trust": I trust the Release Team does
this solely in order to keep the freeze time as short as possible,
everybody hates that time anyway. This trust was created by the very
people behind it, and the way they acted in the past months.
Christoph
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