Sven Luther wrote:
Well, i guess people get rather irritated if sending email to ftp-master email address for things that are mostly reasonable could as well go to /dev/null,
Sure, of course they are, and so they should be. I can fairly readily find 52k more reasons for people to be irritated with Debian too, the most recent numbered 298050. I'm pretty sure I could come up with some more beyond that too.
so i guess it is mostly a communication problem.
But that's not really true either, in my opinion. The issue isn't whether you get a mail back saying "Thankyou for your letter, you have been placed in a priority queue, you are currently at position #548. Please hold. Tralalalalalala." -- it's whether things get done: whether NEW gets processed, removals get done, sections get updated, support for new architectures, features, packages, whatever get implemented.
As a concrete example, I don't think http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.htmlresolves the complaints about NEW and hence I don't think that the NEW issue is an example of a communication problem at all.
You wouldn't accept this kind of behavior from DDs on their package maintenance,
That's not true. Plenty of DDs are non-responsive for one reason or other, and it's perfectly acceptable; we even have documented procedures to deal with that -- NMUs, vacation reports, and QA among other things. It's completely acceptable for volunteers to spend their time how they see fit, prioritising the work they think's most important, or prioritising other parts of their life over Debian if they think that's important.
That's not to that I don't think it's worth improving this and finding ways to encourage people to commit more time to Debian or to use that time more effectively; and for this particular case I've already described what activity I think would lead to the biggest improvement.
but it is perfectly normal for the ftp-masters to do it ?
Meanwhile, I think claims like "You wouldn't accept this from normal people, but it's standard procedure for ftpmaster" are likely to simply exacerbate the problem.
YMMV, of course, and if it does, you might well be right while I'm wrong. Whatever experience I have might provide a better basis for my judgements to rest upon than yours have; or it might mean I'm too close to the problem and completely off-track.
And it is worse since the email don't come from random users, but from the exact same DDs who are all working together to make it all happen.
Ideally all requests from everybody would be acted upon quickly and effectively; but that's not feasible, so they get prioritised. Taking developers more seriously than users, or release managers more seriously than developers are just two variants of the same prioritisation scheme, so I don't think it's worse at all.
Cheers, aj