Re: The "giving some time to the maintainer" rule
On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 08:55:37AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> On 30/05/08 at 18:24 -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 11:49:14AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > > Now, what we don't agree on:
> > > - I think that giving some time should only be very strongly
> > > recommended, but not mandatory.
> > > - You think that giving some time should be mandatory.
> > > I think that our opinions are basically the same. The difference is that
> > > you want to write something in stone, while I prefer not to impose rules
> > > where it's not necessary, because:
> > This is begging the question. Experience tells me that the sort of rules
> > under discussion *are* necessary.
> You are still talking about the rule "The maintainer *MUST* give some
> time to react before uploading the NMU", right?
And rules about when this should not be required.
> > And, so? That's what we have today. What's the problem with this that
> > you're trying to fix?
> No, that's not what we have today. What we have today is the release
> team deciding that it has authority to change the NMU rules, to allow
> 0-day NMUs for bugs older than 7 days old.
> - Does the RT really have authority ?
> - 0-day means "no need to give some time to the maintainer".
So you want to replace it with "people who can edit the developers-reference
deciding that they have the authority to change the NMU rules"?
The developer's reference is non-normative. It lacks either a
constitutional charter for the change process, or constitutionally-delegated
stewards. And it contains lots of recommendations that are one person's
idea about how things should work.
The current devref NMU policy is IMHO one of the better recommendations in
that document. But I also believe it carries weight more because it
encodes the community tradition than because the devref itself has power to
determine such policies.
As for the release team setting policies, Anthony Towns pointed out a couple
of years ago, in a message I can't now put my finger on, that ultimately
it's the ftp masters who decide who's able to upload packages to the archive
or not, NMUs or otherwise. Given that this was in a discussion about 0-day
NMUs, I think that also amounts to tacit approval by the ftpmasters of the
RM-endorsed NMU policies.
> You uploaded a lot of such NMUs yourself, sometimes on packages with an
> active maintainer, without even providing a patch on the BTS previously.
Er, barring mailer errors, in all cases my NMUs included a patch and
declaration of intent-to-NMU sent to the BTS before my NMUs were uploaded.
In the case of NMUs fixing only RC bugs, sometimes the time between the two
events was < 5 minutes, but in all cases it was intended to be consistent
with the NMU policies (including 0-day NMU policies) in force at the time.
> You realize that this discussion about the "NMUers must give some time
> to the maintainer"-rule also affects the current 0-day NMU policy?
... only if you accept the premise that all NMUs should be covered by a
single rule without exception, which I do not?
> One of the goals of the DEP is to make the 0-day NMU policy useless, by
> generalizing it to all bugs (with "delay" > 0 and "delay" a function of
> the severity of bugs being fixed).
Right; I think this is a false generalization because of the negative
side-effects.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
Reply to: