Hi all, During the discussions about NEW on debian-devel in recent times, I had the idea that instead of the current mechanism of sending REJECT mails, Debian could switch to using the BTS for most feedback on NEW packages. This means that most discussion about NEW packages would become public, but of course the ftpmasters could opt to send private mail instead if in some cases if there were sensitive issues to be discussed. The ftpmasters could simply file severity serious bug reports against NEW packages that have issues blocking their entry into Debian. When there are minor issues noticed at the same time, then file bugs of a lower severity. Only when a NEW package has not had its serious bugs fixed in a long time would an eventual removal and REJECT mail happen, perhaps after a few months of zero action on the bug reports. The changes that are needed to make this happen include: The community needs to decide that this change is a good idea and be willing to recieve most feedback on their work in public. The BTS and ftpmaster teams need to agree with this change. One BTS admin said this is feasible in principle and one of the ftpmasters seemed to like the idea when I mentioned it on IRC. Where the bug mail should go to needs to be decided on. Personally I'm thinking the person who did the upload plus the Maintainer field. The people doing processing of NEW packages need to be willing to file bug reports against them where necessary. dak needs to export debian/changelog version lists for NEW packages. debbugs needs to import packages/versions from the new.822 file: https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.822 dak needs to link to the BTS from new.822 and the NEW packages info. https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html The technical work needed here is minimal, so if there are no other volunteers to do that work, then I would be willing to do it. I have experience with Perl/Python but only a small amount of experience with working on the debbugs and dak codebases. Thoughts welcome, especially from those who don't like this idea. -- bye, pabs https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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