Re: Announcement: packaging workflow changes
Hi,
I already posted my criticism to Richard on some MRs that he merged
them too fast and that he should nudge the mailing list to get more
comments.
However, I also want to defend Richard here a bit. We need more people
who are active and improve things. I will comment below to balance out
some claims.
> >> What? You merged all of them in a few hours
>
> It might be sensible to restrict access to the policy repo to only owners
> to prevent this in the future.
I'd prefer not to. We can revert changes if needed, but more
importantly we need people to be active - removing permissions from
people who try to be active is the wrong signal and does not help
build a team.
The biggest miscommunication here was that Richard did a couple tweak
MRs and merged them in one hour, for which I already expressed my
critique. But he did not do the thing Andrew stated above. The
majority of Richard's changes have been pending as open MRs for many
weeks in multiple repositories.
I've encouraged team members to go and review all open MRs and PRs
across all team assets and team packages in e.g.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-go/2026/02/msg00097.html
I'd like to encourage people again to spend time reviewing what is
currently open. That is the best way to drive progress.
> The last wave of policy changes actually took 2 years including an in-person debconf
> to finalize things.
Actually, the changes that started in 2017 are still not done, and the
main person driving them quit Debian years ago because so many
holdouts was stopping him from doing clearly beneficial work, and
those holdouts didn't do the work either, nor did any of them finalize
the policy changes - neither the policy text itself, nor the tooling
to do it.
> If you don't get enough reviews, you should consider to nudge on this list.
Yes. Richard should have done more of that.
At the same time, anyone can right now go and review and comment
whatever MRs are open. We also have people who push directly to git
HEAD or even upload without any room for feedback or discussions.
Richard wasn't behaving ike that, just a little too impatient and fast
to the volunteer cadence typical in Debian.
> > How many team members should approve changes? I think it's
> > counterproductive to wait several days/weeks/months for approvals when
> > it's easy to just revert a change and try again if someone has an objection.
>
> No. It wastes more time and cycles, really. This happened last year in
>
> https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/go-team.pages.debian.net/-/merge_requests/9
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2024/08/msg00299.html
What happened last year is also an example that if you don't get any
feedback in a couple of weeks, you don't get much more in a year (some
of my MR/PRs have been open now well over a year).
The Go team policy does not have any description or agree process on
how to do decisions. The best we in practice have so far is that
people post MRs/PRs and others post there thumbs up or down.
I am happy to brainstorm and agree upon some decision structure beyond
that, but we should not be to hard on new contributors of trying to do
something and not following some unwritten rules.
> I support changing outdated things, and I do agree that speed of making decisions
> is not exactly what I'd call as optimal here. But you ought to give more time.
Yes, I hope Richard continues despite this little incident, and I also
hope that that more time shows up at least 2-3 people commenting and
approving / thumbs up / down all his open MRs/PRs. If not, Richard
hopefully nudges this list again.
> >> I don't even notice your merge requests exist.
> >
> > Can we configure Salsa to email debian-go whenever a MR is opened for
> > the go-team.pages.debian.net project? Should we?
>
> Unsure if configuring this is an option. But you could tag @go-team -- all go-team members
> on salsa would get a notification that way and would probably lead to more reviews.
Please no, that would spam 320+ people who might start turn off their
Salsa notifications completely.
I think the best outcome stems from nudging this list with email (e.g.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-go/2026/02/msg00097.html).
If there are people who have the interest and bandwidth to actively
comment on all PRs, they should subscribe to the repositories they are
interested in. Instructions at https://wiki2025.debian.org/wiki/Salsa.
I don't have instructions at hand for GitHub, but same 'watch'
principles apply to https://github.com/Debian/dh-make-golang as well.
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