Re: Announcement: packaging workflow changes
On 26/03/26 6:51 pm, Otto Kekäläinen wrote:
>>>> 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.
I reviewed them and left some comments after sending my last e-mail.
>> 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.
I wasn't a part of this team or even the project back in the day. But if in case you
are calling me a holdout, I want to express that it's very discouraging to hear for
me. I'm quite sure that I do actual work in multiple areas/teams.
(all of this is unpaid, volunteer free time/hours)
>> 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.
And that's actually fine - and I understand the eagerness to get things merged
when you have spent cycles on it. What is not fine is not acknowledging that this
was problematic, which I did not find in Richard's last email and prompted
me to respond.
>>> 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).
I think some of your MRs were reverted after more than 5 months of being proposed
so I'm unsure if I agree fully concur. But I agree that things can keep piling
up for long if no-one attends to it.
> 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.
That'd be good. But I also think that this is not specific to the go team.
I've not seen documented procedures for policy changes in a large majority
of the teams that I have come across thus far; so I reckon this problem
exists debian-wide.
>>>> 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.
When you say "all PRs", do you mean all MRs across all projects in the go-team?
Reply to: