Sven Luther wrote:
On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 09:29:41AM +0000, Helen Faulkner wrote:You are welcome to either post suggested questions to this list, or to email myself and/or Martin privately with your suggestions. If you wish your questions to be anonymous, please email us privately and make that clear.Ok, i have one question.
Can we keep the debate questions off this list? Otherwise the choice is between leaving them unanswered for a couple of weeks until the debate, or having them already answered on the list, and thus redundant for the debate. Having different Subjects for different topics would be nice too...
I would like to know from the DPL candidates what is their opinion on way the ftp-masters handle the NEW queue,
I think this is the wrong question. The right question to ask is what the ftpmasters think of the way NEW is being handled, and what resources they would appreciate. There's two reasons for this. One is the whole point of having people running a particular area is that they know what's going on; given the choice between a specialist's analysis of the problems and a generalist's, take the former. The other is that asking the DPL or DPL candidates to look for problems in the way others are doing their jobs is just asking for unnecessary conflicts: there are _always_ going to be problems in the way _every_ task within Debian is handled. The issue isn't whether there are problems, it's which problems are the most important to handle. And NEW processing doesn't even come close.
and in particular how they handle the packages that are not really NEW : renamed binary/source packages, package split, new kernel version and new library version which need a new packageupload.
NEW is a technical term -- it means binary and source packages that are not already in the archive under that name. So those packages *are* really NEW, and that's not even a debatable question. I've already addressed this topic with my ftpmaster hat on recently, see:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/02/msg00225.html
Do you think there is currently a problem about this, and if so what do you intent to change in this regard.
What I am doing about it is processing packages that are stuck in NEW that are holding up higher priority tasks such as the release and security updates. Other ftpmasters are doing likewise.
What I will do if elected is to support ftpmaster and other delegates in their actions so they can focus on doing useful work according to their own best judgement (which is, after all, why they're a delegate in the first place), rather than having to justify their actions in response to the latest fad complaint.
Cheers, aj