Sven Luther wrote:
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.You wouldn't accept this kind of behavior from DDs on their package maintenance,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.
There are, likewise, things you can't do via NMUs -- you can't close bugs, only mark them fixed; and you can't make major changes to the package, only apply fairly basic fixes and updates. The monitoring tasks QA do can similarly be done over ftpmaster by anyone -- see Jeroen's removals page at http://ftp-master.wolffelaar.nl/removals.html eg. The "these people are MIA and need to be replaced" variant for delegates is action by the DPL instead of a random person from the -qa list, but it exists too.
Also for comparison, you might consider Bug#97040 -- Adrian introduced that bug into util-linux as part of advocating that broken Standards-Version: headers should be considered release critical, and refused to fix it while it wasn't. The bug eventually got fixed some eight months later when Adrian retired from the project, and the package was taken over.
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.
The release managers have pretty easy access to ftpmaster for hurrying along release issues; it's also far easier to take their word that something is a release issue than random developers.
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.
Yes, that's quite true. I think the best way of breaking that cycle is killing off off-topic threads on lists; it seems both like it's not something we're going to miss too terribly, and it's something we really haven't tried yet either.
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 ?
It's not a technical issue it's a legal one -- our approach to satisfying the legal requirements for including crypto software in main require us to manually process each package with a new name. Yes, it really is necessary.
Cheers, aj