Re: Quality Assurance Group mini-policy

[Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com>]

Josip Rodin <joy@cibalia.gkvk.hr> writes:

> However, if QA Group members make 3 consecutive bugfix uploads within two
> months, with still no action from the actual package maintainer, then the
> package will be marked orphaned, and the 'Maintainer' field of the
> package will be set to "Debian QA Group <debian-qa@lists.debian.org>".

I am not sure we want to impose such a practice on developers.  The
term "forced orphaning" is not intended to give violent connotations
to the act of marking packages as orphaned.

1. "forced orphaning" by the QA group can occur in as little as 3
   days, a long weekend.  Assume we have 3 critical bugs, reported a
   day apart from one another.  Since the required response time is 2
   days for critical bugs before a QA team upload, you could have as
   many as three uploads in a 6 day period, resulting in the package
   being marked as orphan.  If we are in a freeze, this is halved, so
   three days, three uploads.

2. NMU policies are sufficient to guarantee quality, we do not need to
   extend this into something covering "forced orphaning".  QA
   mini-policy should have no bearing on Debian's expectations of
   developers as maintainers, as there is no need.

>From what I can tell, current policy encourages waiting several weeks
before doing even an NMU to unstable (regardless of bug severity).
This mini-policy would be a fairly major change.  Even if it's not
official policy or holds no real wait, it does indeed present a
different understanding of what maintainers need to do to retain their
maintainership of a package than the rest of the policy documents, and
should be re-examined.

-- 
Craig Brozefsky        <craig@red-bean.com>
Less matter, more form!      - Bruno Schulz
ignazz, I am truly korrupted by yore sinful tzourceware. -jb
The Osmonds! You are all Osmonds!! Throwing up on a freeway at dawn!!!