What is going wrong with NEW?
In the moment of writing these lines, we have 361 packages in the NEW queue [0].
No all of those packages are strictly NEW, some are just packages containing new
binaries or just package renames.
The team who look at this, also handle another stuff like packages removal from
the archive or maintaining the archive or [1]. Overall, I think they are not
doing a bad job, but it not enough, in some areas the distribution development
is blocked (or broken) because of NEW.
Examples:
-Latest QEMU release can not be uploaded because a package that is waiting in
NEW for almost 2 months now.
-KDE users can not install KDE 4.2.1 (for i386 users it is even broken) because
package renames that are stuck at NEW.
-Xfce 4.6 is totally blocked by NEW.
-If you are using seahorse (mostly gnome users), you will be looking forward to
seahorse-plugins enter in the archive.
-Mono transition seems to be having some problems with NEW processing also.
Personally, there is some stuff at NEW i would like to try as user (ears,
dulwich). And I am sure there is more stuff blocked or broken that I have not
idea about why I do not need it.
I do not think we can just think here: it is yet another Debian team who lacks
of manpower and they do the best they can. It is an infrastructure team that is
blocking (not on purpose, of course) the development on our distribution.
Sometimes we are lucky, since they fast tracked KDE 4.2.0 in NEW and we all
were able to enjoy it at the same time of the release. They also fast tracked
stuff like the Linux kernel 2.6.28. But those are just patch solutions to the
real problem: NEW is too slow.
Another bad patchs to the problem are maintainers thincking how to avoid sending
their packages to NEW, which is sad.
If you look at the graph [2] you will see that NEW get a huge number of
packages then it is processed in a burst. This patterns shows clearly
something is not working well.
I do not understand why python2.6 (targeted experimental) has been already for
one week in NEW. Or why some packages that spend months in NEW, mostly because
legal issues, with the people who uploaded them getting no feedback at all of
what the FTP master team is expecting or doing.
Some people could say: do not complain and join the FTP team and help them.
I do not have all the conditions they ask[2] and I do not see the point of
just add another overloaded DD to the FTP team.
I am not finger pointing here to nobody. I just want to highlight that our
current way of dealing with NEW as project is broken and we *need* to try to
search for a better way to handle it.
[0] http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
[1] More details of their duties at http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/FTPMaster
[2] http://people.debian.org/~corsac/
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/05/msg00012.html
Ana
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