Perhaps maintainers should stand up and review some packages of their peers?Absolutely. This already happens a little bit. It would be excellent if more people could do it.
Maybe my experience with Fedora and Cygwin could be of interest. As a new packager, I made my first package ('logiweb') and submitted it to Debian, Fedora, and Cygwin:
Aug 2009 Submitted http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=543550 Sep 2009 Submitted https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=523715 Mar 2010 Package pushed to Fedora stable May 2010 Sent ITP to Cygwin May 2010 Package uploaded to CygwinSep-Mar I corrected the package under guidance of a Fedora sponsor (thanks). I was also lucky enough that a DD looked at my Debian package and gave guidance (thanks). But it seems that DD's are overloaded. At least my package is not in Debian yet.
Once my Fedora package was in shape, I was asked to demonstrate my technical skills by either preparing one more Fedora package or do a pre-review of some other package. So I chose to do a pre-review.
I picked a package, but somebody else was faster, and the package was processed before I could get started. Then I shortlisted ten packages I found I was competent to pre-review, waited a few days, three packages were taken, picked one of the remaining packages, assigned it to myself, and did the pre-review. When my pre-review was accepted by my sponsor, my package was uploaded.
Once accepted in Fedora, uploading to Cygwin went very smoothly (thanks).So this is my experience with Fedora: When I came with my package, the Fedora community did something for me (reviewed the package) then required me to do something for them (do a pre-review), and the package was accepted. That seems quite fair.
Furthermore, Fedora had a list of packages waiting for review, and it was easy to find one to pick.
I am not saying Fedora is ideal. On a Fedora mailing list, I just saw an invitation to come and celebrate the one-year anniversary of a Fedora review request.
My point, however, is that having some sort of formalized way in which maintainers can unload DDs could be a good thing.
Cheers, Klaus