Policy Weekly Issue #4/4: Announcing new packages before uploading them

[Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>]

Topic 4: Announcing new packages before uploading them

STATE: APPROVAL

According to current policy, every upload of a new package to the archive
has to be announced on debian-devel _before_ the package is uploaded to
the master site. However, must developers do not know this yet. That's why
it should be documented. (I think the right place for this is the Debian
Developer's Reference.) 

Here is a list of advantages of this policy:

   * It helps the (potentially new) maintainer to tap into the experience
     of people on the list, and lets them know if any one else is working
     on it already

   * It lets other people thinking about working on the package know that
     there already is a volunteer, and efforts may be shared

   * It lets the rest of the maintainers know more about the package than
     the one line description and the changelog entry "Initial version"
     that generally gets posted to debian-devel-changes by default

   * It is helpful to the people who live off unstable (and form our first
     line of testers); we should encourage these people

   * I think the annoncements gives us a better feel of what is going on,
     and what is new, in the project.

   * We should not dismiss anybody who installs from usntable and helps us
     debug our packages as "fools, fools, you installed from unstable; you
     deserve what you get" -- we derive a certain benefit from the alpha
     testers

   * If we appreciate alpha testers, than any name changes have to be
     backwards compatible with the people who already installed the old
     package (conflict and relace old package name at a minimum)

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