Re: Upload every package every release cycle

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Lars Wirzenius:
> Should we require each source package in Debian to be uploaded at
> least once per release cycle?
> 
> Lintian[0] reports that there are currently over 7000 packages with an
> ancient Standards-Version. That's a lot of packages. Some of those
> haven't been uploaded in years. That means that the packages haven't
> had attention by their maintainer (or an NMUer) in years. Sometimes
> that's OK: there's nothing that needs changing in the package, and
> upstream is dormant.
> 
> However, it seems to me that without inspecting each package manually,
> we can't know if fixes are needed. It would seems to me that having an
> automated way of verifying that a package gets at least minimal
> attention would be good for Debian.
> 
> I propose we implement that by requiring that each package gets
> uploaded at least once per release cycle, and that the upload updates
> the package to match current policy, indicated by updating the
> Standards-Version field to one that is not ancient.
> 
> In more detail, I propose the following:
> 
> * When the release freeze begins, every package in testing must have a
>   Standards-Version that is less than 24 months old (the threshold for
>   the ancient-standards-version warning in lintian), and will be
>   removed from testing.
> 
> * Six months before the freeze, RC bugs get filed for any packages
>   that have the ancient-standards-version lintian warning. This would
>   leave ample time to fix the problem for any one package.
> 
> [0]: https://lintian.debian.org/tags/ancient-standards-version.html
> 

Hi Lars,

Thanks for the proposal.

I am not certain this is a proposal that should be driven by the release
team.  Given its wide-spread affect on how volunteers will have to
allocate their Debian time and how many packages it affect, I think it
should have consensus among the Debian developer body rather than just
the release team.  In particular, I am concerned that a significant
amount of people will oppose this as a QA check worthy of gating
packaging from the release.

Along those lines, it might be interesting to start off less ambitious
and limit it to several releases out of date.  I have pulled the numbers
grouped by the date of the policy used in [1].  Note these numbers are
from unstable + experimental; we do not have the numbers from testing
(as lintian only check unstable + experimental).

Thanks,
~Niels

[1]

$ grep ancient-standards /srv/lintian.debian.org/logs/lintian.log | \
   perl -p -E 's/.*\(released (\d+-\d+-\d+)\).*/$1/' | sort  | uniq -c
      1 1999-07-15
      2 1999-11-16
      3 2000-08-24
      1 2001-01-29
      1 2001-02-15
     10 2001-02-18
      1 2001-06-01
     10 2001-07-25
      4 2002-08-31
      6 2002-11-15
      2 2003-03-07
      2 2003-05-10
      6 2003-07-09
     33 2003-08-19
     39 2005-06-17
    179 2006-05-03
    109 2007-12-03
    131 2008-06-04
     78 2009-03-12
     62 2009-06-16
    199 2009-08-16
    205 2010-01-27
     23 2010-06-28
    230 2010-07-26
    568 2011-04-07
    669 2012-02-23
    820 2012-09-19
   1251 2013-10-28
   2812 2014-09-17