Re: Q to all candidates: NEW queue
On 27/03/20 at 12:23 +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
> At least during my many years of Ubuntu archive administration I've actually
> seen quite a lot of packages which contained non-distributable files, had
> hilariously broken maintainer scripts (which could then also damage *other*
> software on your system), and the like. For these an initial NEW review was
> quite important.
>
> That proposal is assuming that the "package gets reviewed, a bug is filed" step
> actually happens timely, but that is precisely the problem -- with such a
> workflow we would essentially stop having NEW review and just hope that someone
> catches bad packages before they get released. So IMHO this is not a solution,
> and only causes buggy packages to creep into unstable.
So in my original mail, I proposed that new packages would get
immediately accepted into unstable, but would still require a review
before migrating to testing. I believe that it's an interesting compromise,
because:
- while in unstable, they would get tested by our regular QA tools, that
are likely to find some of the issues ftpmasters would have found
- it makes it possible for the maintainer to get early feedback from
users, and to continue working on packaging reverse dependencies.
- it's unstable, so even if it's severely broken, it's probably not a
big deal. We have lots of packages in unstable that have been severely
broken for years anyway.
- it protects 'testing' (and our stable releases) from unreviewed
packages.
Of course this only works if Debian doesn't get sued for copyright
infringement too often. I wonder if that would be a problem (it's
probably less likely to be a problem for packages in 'main' than for
packages in 'non-free').
Lucas
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