Re: Remove packages from NEW queue?

[Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>]

Hi Jonas,

I've thought that it is probably not my turn to answer your questions
but since there was no answer yet I'd like to report from my experience.

Am Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 05:21:45PM +0100 schrieb Jonas Smedegaard:
> 
> Is "Age" used to rank processing of NEW requests?

I have some evidence that "Age" is at least not the only ranking
factor for processing NEW requests.  I've made the experience that
the following hints are well perceived by ftpmaster:

   1. Package in new fixes RC bug #xy
   2. Package has just a new binary name and might be easier
      to process than other packages
   3. Package has some importance for reason XY (this worked
      extremely well in April last year when we had the Debian
      Med Covid-19 sprint - I observed processing times less
      than 24 hours and I can't say frequently enough how thankful
      I am about this

It is not always clear to me what channel is best for submitting
those hints.  IRC usefully works nicely, but not always.  Responding
to the mail that a package is in new can be helpful as well.  For
the Covid-19 sprint we had setup a dedicated Wiki page.

> Is that documented somewhere?

As far as I know it is not documented.

> Or alternatively, do anyone have some (non cargo cult) 
> empirical knowledge about that?

See above about my experience with ranking.  I also think that my habit
to say thank you to ftpmaster whenever there is a sensible chance is
also a good way to motivate ftpmaster to do a work which I personally
would consider not the most thrilling task on my own desk.  It probably
helps more than telling that ftpmaster is slow in working down the
queue.  So:  Thank you to ftpmaster for processing the queue.

However, I wished at least one member of ftpmaster team would lurk here
on this list to clarify questions like these.  What I was explicitly
told by more than one ftpmaster is that kind of "free text" e-mails in
their mailbox tend to be forgotten in the large amount of so many mails
to this mailbox I can not even imagine.  Thus I do not ftpmaster in my
response which I would usually do in cases like this.

Kind regards

      Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de