Re: Consequences of the NEW queue's length [Was: Remove packages from NEW queue?]
On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 11:52 AM Gard Spreemann <gspr@nonempty.org> wrote:
>
> Every time I see stories like this, I wonder what the consequences of
> the NEW queue's current workings are. This is *not* criticism of the
> heroic work of the FTP Masters, nor is it criticism of the objectives
> they have in processing the NEW queue. I do, however, worry that months
> of waiting to see the fruits of one's labor might be detrimental to
> attracting new contributors, or indeed to motivate already active
> ones. It also seems to be a not insigificant impediment to getting
> useful work, such as a SONAME bump, done quickly. At least personally, I
> find it harder to put in small pieces of work that result in incremental
> improvements if the result is having to wait months – with the added
> uncertainty of having to do it all again (for good reasons, but
> nevertheless).
>
> It may well be that I'm asking the impossible here, but it does seem to
> be a problem that other distributions don't suffer under to the same
> extent. Is it merely a matter of their standards being lower, or is
> there some room for improvement on our part?
I don't know if that has been proposed before, but how about waiving
the NEW queue requirement for experimental packages as a start? This
would allow us to work with new packages or soversion updates, and the
transition through NEW to "unstable" could happen at the same time
(i.e. upload to unstable for NEW and uploading again for
experimental). Since packages in experimental will never land in any
official release, I think dropping the NEW queue requirement has no
negative impact.
One could also go further and do this automatically for unstable ->
testing (all package uploads allowed to unstable, new ones have to be
approved by the ftp-masters before they can transition).
Regards,
Stephan
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