Re: Legal advice regarding the NEW queue
Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com> writes:
> On Tuesday, February 1, 2022 12:18:07 PM EST Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> writes:
>>> For what it is worth I concur with everything that Russ has written,
>>> and would like to have us look at this again (and that's honestly not
>>> particularly because I currenly have the honour of the 6th-oldest
>>> package in NEW (8 months) :-) In general I have found NEW valuable as
>>> FTP-masters sometimes spot things that I missed, but the delay, and
>>> perhaps worse, the highly uncertain length of the delay (anything from
>>> a day to a year), is a significant cost and drag, and it seems
>>> increasingly anachronistic as the rest of the software ecosystem seems
>>> to accelerate around us (not entirely a good thing, of course). Who
>>> needs quality when you can have updates, eh?
>> I would hate to entirely lose the quality review that we get via NEW,
>> but I wonder if we could regain many those benefits by setting up some
>> sort of peer review system for new packages that is less formal and
>> less bottlenecked on a single team than the current NEW processing
>> setup.
> It's my impression that review of copyright and license considerations
> when not going through New is not a priority for most. I doubt making
> New go away will make it more so.
To be clear, that's not the part I was intending to reference. I think we
spend too much time reviewing copyright and license considerations for the
amount of benefit we get from it and would rather we rely more heavily on
automated tools and upstream's assertions, and otherwise be more reactive
and less proactive about issues that aren't fundamental to whether
something is free software. (This is one of the reasons why I'm
interested in REUSE. I would love for us to be able to leverage the work
that some upstreams have already done and trust it unless we know it's
wrong.)
I was thinking about all the other things that NEW catches, where people
have accidentally made more foundational mistakes in constructing a
package. That comes up a lot in these discussions and I do think there's
merit in NEW as another pair of eyes on each new package. That's the part
that I think would be interesting to try to find a way to preserve if
possible.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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