Re: Testing removal policy (was: Mechanism in place...)
On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 11:34:00PM +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 08:31:24PM +0000, Joey Hess wrote:
> > Another case is NTP, which was kicked out of testing for a
> > licensing bug, causing much grief to be reported on debian-user.
> FWIW I was the one asking the removal: upstream has a fix that is
> backportable, not trivially, but that is. And there is openntpd that is
> a drop in replacement for most desktop users (and I assume that testing
> users aren't really servers, that would need the additionnal features
> ntp provides and openntpd has not). Here is my rationale.
I don't see any reason for assuming that the users of testing are desktop
users and not server users. Making such assumptions in the management of
testing is sure to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, though; if you make it so
that the contents of testing aren't reliable enough to meet the needs of
generic server users, you're guaranteed to get less people willing to use
testing on servers and give feedback in advance of the release, which is not
a win for Debian.
I think the release team is critically underestimating the negative impact
that cavalierly kicking packages out of testing has on developers'
motivation. It will /compel/ maintainers who depend on their own packages
to take care of the RC bugs, certainly, and in some cases it will elicit a
reflection on the part of the maintainer that they aren't maintaining their
packages as well as they ought to; but you're also going to get people
thinking, "wow, the release team thinks my package is expendable" - which is
just not something that encourages maintainers to *feel good* about their
involvement in Debian.
So when responding to complaints that packages have been removed from
testing, you might try showing a little more empathy towards the people that
are negatively affected by such decisions, because to me the messages
written in the defense of these removals come across as callously
indifferent.
--
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
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