Re: possibly exhausted ftp-masters (Re: Do we still value contributions?
Mo Zhou <lumin@debian.org> writes:
> Don't know what Red Hat family does, but at least Archlinux and Gentoo
> treat the license checking problem in a very permissive way. However,
> Debian is sometimes an important reference to these friend distros when
> they encountered some problems about license.
I do think we can maintain that property without hand-checking every file
in every source package we upload. My sense (I could be wrong) is that
other distributions look at us more for our analysis of the license terms
than for our ability to dig out obscure issues from source trees. And
even if it's finding obscure issues in the source tree, we still have a
lot of eyes and a community that cares about these things and it's always
possible for people to do volunteer reviews.
Another option that I forgot to mention is that we could continue to ask
the package maintainer to do a thorough license review and treat licensing
problems as bugs. One way to think about the current ftpmaster review is
that we treat licensing bugs far more seriously than other bugs and thus
have mandatory code review for licensing issues but not for anything else
in Debian. And again, that could be exactly what we want to do, but it's
worth calling it out as a deliberate choice. We could decide to treat
licensing bugs as less special (with appropriate legal advice, of course).
> Making that process scalable seemed like a workflow change, which often
> takes centuries to enforce in this community. Even if that process can
> be scaled to a larger group of workers, without proper tool every worker
> node will still work in low efficiency (and still easily get mentally
> bored).
Well, in this case the workflow is already centralized, so I think it's
more tractable than that. But yes, thank you for starting the discussion
of the tool. I think such a tool is extremely valuable for maintainers
regardless, and will make any workflow that involves any central review
under any circumstances much easier.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: