Re: Question for candidate Towns [Was, Re: DPL election IRC Debate - Call for questions]
On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 03:29:58AM -0800, Anthony Towns wrote:
> 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.
Yeah, but it would be nice to get at least a little notice when you send a
nice email to ftp-masters asking to please get a NEW processing for a given
package since it is *NEEDED* for the d-i rc3 deadline which is approaching
fast. Complete silence is in my opinion not in order on this.
And there is clearly a subgroup of people who know how to approach the
ftp-masters through irc to accelerate the processing. But i don't think this
should be the canonical approach to this.
> As a concrete example, I don't think
>
> http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
>
> resolves the complaints about NEW and hence I don't think that the NEW
> issue is an example of a communication problem at all.
I on the contrary think so, the above is nice though and i didn't knew about
this, but communication goes both ways.
> >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.
Ok, so you advocate NMUing the ftp-masters on NEW processing, i am all in
favor for that :) Well, it is not really possible, which is why this is a
problem.
> 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.
Sure. But by doing so, they stale the work of others, especially as things are
important for the release schedule.
> 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.
How well, i am grilled with the ftp-masters anyway, so ...
> 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.
yeah, but for packages, we have the QA team, which can take over, or some
random developer looking at the MIA status of a developer or a package can
take over. For the ftp-masters this is not only not possible, but any critic
is often rejected and there is a certain amount of taboo going on, which then
explodes in huge flames, and the ftp-master feel aggressed by it, and don't
react and then you go in circle again.
And again to my purely technical question. Is it really necessary for
kernel-source-2.6.11 to go through NEW once it is uploaded for example ?
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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