Re: package ownership in Debian
On Fri, Jul 28, 2006, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> Simply change the NMUs to be always 0-day, for all bugs >=normal. Which
> means - upload and mail to BTS at the same time.
> And such dumb rules some maintainer have like "never touch my package"
> get ignored - if it complains it should do a better maintainer job...
I think this can get in the way of properly maintaining some packages
and can cause additional work in some cases. I think it would be an
awful move in the current state of the Debian community.
First, if the maintainer is working on larger changes, he won't send a
message to all of his bugs to say "hold off any NMU, I'm working on
this".
Second, if the maintainer is maintaining stuff in a VCS, merging the
NMU can be a pain which causes additional work.
Third, too many people are doing ugly NMUs and simply don't care of
the result. I was the victim of multiple awful NMUs that caused
additional work to me (because I had to handle upgrades from this NMU),
disrupted migration to testing of package groups, introduced bugs etc.
I have a problem with giving everybody the right to do 0-days NMUs, for
normal (or serious) bugs, and this problem is connected to the fact
that some developers do crap and *don't* *care* about it.
I know that package quality can vary from person to person, and that
some people *cherish* their packages, and this is not what I want to
discuss. Instead, I think that the problem would be with the outlaws
to the expected good behavior we should have with packages in the
archive in such a scheme.
Would we all be friendly to each other, the solution would be
educational: we would simply learn from comments of fellows, or simply
learn from our mistakes. But the current climate in Debian does not
permit this.
--
Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>
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