Re: DEP1: Clarifying policies and workflows for Non Maintainer Uploads (NMUs)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net> wrote:

> The DEP currently addresses communication like that:
>
>   When doing an NMU, you must always send a patch with the differences
>   between the current package and your NMU to the BTS.  If the bug you
>   are fixing isn't reported yet, you must do that as well.
>
> I have several questions about the requirement for communication that
> you want to add:
> - Do you want to require two-way communication?
> - If the maintainer doesn't answer, how much time should the NMUer wait
>   for the maintainer, in your opinion?

That has to be decided by common sense, on a case-by-case basis. I
remember when once I screwed up the postrm script of tetex-base or
-bin, and it meant that every attempt of a buildd to build a package
which build-depended on teTeX would lead to a screwed buildd which
needed manual intervention.

The package was NMUed without asking, and I think that was correct. I
was upset at the time, partly because I sort the ACCEPTED messages
differently than BTS e-mail, and read the upload notification before I
even knew about the bug, and partly because there was no patch or NMU
announcement in the BTS.

But except for the missing patch: Doing the upload ASAP was the right
thing to do, given the simpleness of the fix (a trivial bash syntax
error).




But the DEP *should* definitely require an explicit "I want to NMU" or,
in the teTeX case, "I have done the NMU".

> The current wording requires a notification (by sending a mail to the
> BTS). I don't think that it's a good idea to additionally require that
> this mail should be sent to the maintainer's private email address,
> because that doesn't work well with co-maintainance.

Agreed.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)