Hello again,
sorry for the previous email, seems that formatting was a
disaster, let me try again.
What comes to DEP-14 and timelines, do you agree that debian/sid predated the 2020 version of DEP-14 and the two options it now recommends are debian/latest and is some situations debian/unstable?
That is correct, and I didn't get this subtlety when I wrote my previous email, my mistake. After careful re-reading, DEP-14 says: "for the development branches we recommend the <vendor>/<suite> scheme over <vendor>/<codename>".
I am merely raising discussion that since the Go team guide originally referred to DEP-14, it might be time to update it to match new version.
That also seems correct to me. If Go team wants to adhere strictly to DEP-14, it should update its default branch name. Otherwise the team should update the wording, and clarify that it adheres to DEP-14 with some exceptions, eg. keep using debian/sid for the branch name, if that makes more sense.
I took checked quickly the packages you most recently contributed to (rebuildd, dput-ng, fierce, schroot, cadaver, wafwoof) they all seem to use either 'master' or 'debian/master' as the branch. Based on a small and possibly skewed sample you aren't using 'debian/sid' outside of the Go team.
I mostly contribute to existing packages, so the packaging branch already exists, I don't decide how it's named.
What would you then think of a policy that people can choose what branch name they want to use, as long as the git HEAD is maintained to always point to the Debian branch? There was several comments regarding the team policy discussion stating general distrust towards having policies. Could an option here be to update the Go team policy to say that a package can use any branch name in DEP-14?
At this point I must mention that I'm a very minor contributor in Go team. I'm not the ideal person to discuss that. But my impression is that *changing* the branch name to anything else is a divisive topic. Changing to debian/sid back in 2018 was divisive and created some tensions, as you can see at https://lists.debian.org/debian-go/2018/09/threads.html. Maybe people don't want to go through that again?
I have been raising ideas on the mailing list for discussion, provided examples, promised to do my part in the implementation, listened and responded to all who shared their views etc. On Dec 8th I specifically raised on the mailing list the question on how decisions in the Go team work and got advice (thanks Nilesh) on who are the stakeholders (https://lists.debian.org/debian-go/2024/12/msg00030.html). Unfortunately none of them have replied to any emails. I have sent several emails to Anthony Fok who seems to have been the main maintainer for the team tools in past years, but unfortunately he hasn't responded either. If people are missing then the remaining volunteers need to try do their part, and I have diligently done. I have waited a long time, just like is best practice in Debian. Some of the comments of "only in software companies" don't feel correct here. The Go team already has a policy, and it was to my knowledge a volunteer team when the policy was made Updating it every 5 years is fully feasible for a volunteer group like us and not something only software companies can do. I published the proposal or the proposal as an MR, and revised it based on feedback in both the MR and on the mailing list. Putting out the proposal now was a perfectly fair and proper course of action to get more visibility and solicit more feedback.
I'm subscribed to debian-go mailing list, I've seen that you started several discussions. Indeed you've done a great job with that, no problem. Now, you just joined the team 3 months ago, so I suppose that when you propose to change how the team works, you're looking for feedback from "core contributors" in the team, either the most experienced or the most active at the moment, or both. It's not clear who they are so far, so I checked on UDD. I looked for uploads made by the maintainer 'team+pkg-go@tracker.debian.org', for the year 2024, and I came up with the following top-10 uploaders: 51 Francisco Vilmar Cardoso Ruviaro 57 Guillem Jover 59 Maytham Alsudany 79 Shengjing Zhu 111 Martin Dosch 120 Simon Josefsson 150 Daniel Swarbrick 179 Anthony Fok 324 Mathias Gibbens 325 Reinhard Tartler That's a total of 1,455 uploads for this top-10 uploaders, ie. 75% of the grand total of 1,933 uploads, for the year 2024. If we agree on this definition of "core contributors", and if we look back on the threads you started [1][2][3], I see that only 3 of them participated in the discussion. Reinhard answered only once (and wasn't in favor of changing the branch name), while Simon and Maytham contributed actively to the discussions. Then you opened the MR [4], and only Maytham (from the top-10) participated. That's far from a team-wide consensus. IMO there need to be more feedback from this top-10 (or top-20 or more), and ideally someone steps up and merges the MR in the name of the team. I think it just takes more time than you'd like, and I don't have the solution to get people to participate either. Again, thanks for all the work you've put into that, and I hope that positive changes come out of it. Best, Arnaud ---- [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-go/2024/12/msg00021.html [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-go/2025/01/msg00005.html [3] https://lists.debian.org/debian-go/2025/01/msg00045.html [4] https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/go-team.pages.debian.net/-/merge_requests/7