Re: Bits from the Release Team (Jessie freeze info)
On 2013-10-29 16:05, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Niels Thykier writes ("Bits from the Release Team (Jessie freeze info)"):
>> Results of porter roll-call
>> ===========================
> ...
>> Summary table:
>> Arch || DDs || NMs/DMs || Other || Total
>> - ---------------++-----++---------++-------++------
>> armel || 5 || 0 || 2 || 7
>> armhf || 6 || 1 || 2 || 9
>> hurd-i386 || 5 || 0 || 3 || 8
>> ia64 || *0* || 0 || 3 || 3
>> kfreebsd-amd64 || 5 || 0 || 2 || 6
>> kfreebsd-i386 || 5 || 0 || 2 || 6
>> mips || 2 || 0 || 1 || 3
>> mipsel || 2 || 0 || 1 || 3
>> powerpc[1] || (1) || 0 || 2 || 2.5?
>> s390x || 1 || 0 || 1 || 2
>> sparc || 1 || 0 || 0 || 1
> ...
>> Based on the number of porters, we are considering changing the
>> current requirements of "5 DDs" to better reflect the reality of the
>> situation. We will follow up in a future bits on the changes.
>
> Thanks.
>
You are welcome. :)
> I think it is disappointing to find that we may be dropping
> architectures where a significant amount of effort is available,
> simply because the volunteers don't have enough status - specifically,
> because of a lack of DDs.
>
As mentioned we are debating whether the "5 DDs" requirement still makes
sense. Would you say that we should abolish the requirement for DD
porters completely? I.e. Even if there are no (soon to be) DDs, we
should consider the porter requirements fulfilled as long as they are
enough "active porters" behind the port[0]?
> I'm keen that Debian should continue to support a wide range of
> architectures. Would it help if I, as a DD, volunteered to sponsor
> porter uploads for any architecture ? That is I guess I'm
> volunteering to become a new kind of person - a "non-port-specific
> porter sponsor".
>
I suppose that could help ports without a DD if we allowed such to be in
testing. However, it is my understanding that our main issue with ports
often is that they are not actively maintained (or appears to lack
active maintenance).
As an example I remember having received several complains from e.g.
the GCC maintainers in regards to the state of gcc on various ports[1].
Here I would suspect a patch would be sufficient without needing to
actually NMU gcc to get the fix in.
There are also stuff like the port concerns from DSA that attention.
> Obviously I will review the debdiff etc. I'm an experienced C
> programmer with some background in C language lawyering and
> portability stuff, so I should usually be able to do a decent review
> of a patch even on an unfamiliar architecture.
>
> In fact, regardless of what the release team decide for the policy, I
> would be happy to sponsor porter uploads. Please just email me.
>
> Ian.
>
>
:)
~Niels
[0] Leaving the definition of "active porter" vaguely defined for now.
[1] Obviously, I haven't been keeping track of them so I had to ask for
a reminder.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2013/10/msg00710.html
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