Hi Paul, Am Thu, Apr 28, 2022 at 08:54:05AM +0800 schrieb Paul Wise: > During the discussions about NEW on debian-devel in recent times, I had > the idea that instead of the current mechanism of sending REJECT mails, > Debian could switch to using the BTS for most feedback on NEW packages. > > This means that most discussion about NEW packages would become public, > but of course the ftpmasters could opt to send private mail instead if > in some cases if there were sensitive issues to be discussed. > > The ftpmasters could simply file severity serious bug reports against > NEW packages that have issues blocking their entry into Debian. When > there are minor issues noticed at the same time, then file bugs of a > lower severity. Only when a NEW package has not had its serious bugs > fixed in a long time would an eventual removal and REJECT mail happen, > perhaps after a few months of zero action on the bug reports.
I consider this a really nice solution for the majority of rejects and I think a lot of good arguments were given inside the discussion you was refering to. > The changes that are needed to make this happen include: > > The community needs to decide that this change is a good idea and be > willing to recieve most feedback on their work in public. > > The BTS and ftpmaster teams need to agree with this change. > One BTS admin said this is feasible in principle and one of the > ftpmasters seemed to like the idea when I mentioned it on IRC. I admit I would be happy if this "seemed to like the idea" would be confirmed here in a public place. ;-) > Where the bug mail should go to needs to be decided on. Personally I'm > thinking the person who did the upload plus the Maintainer field. What about WNPP bug? When I asked ftpmaster to kindly CC their rejects to the WNPP bug I was told that not all packages in new have WNPP bugs. If we want to formalise this it could probably be enforced that new packages really need to have such a bug and we only need to decide for existing packages that need to pass NEW. (BTW, I usually bounce any reject to the according WNPP bug to have the issue documented in a publicly visible place where any interested person should look.) > The people doing processing of NEW packages need to be willing to file > bug reports against them where necessary. > > dak needs to export debian/changelog version lists for NEW packages. > > debbugs needs to import packages/versions from the new.822 file: > > https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.822 > > dak needs to link to the BTS from new.822 and the NEW packages info. > > https://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html > > The technical work needed here is minimal, so if there are no other > volunteers to do that work, then I would be willing to do it. I have > experience with Perl/Python but only a small amount of experience with > working on the debbugs and dak codebases. > > Thoughts welcome, especially from those who don't like this idea. Sorry, I'm amongst those who absolutely like this idea. ;-) Thanks a lot for the follow up on the past discussion. Kind regards Andreas. -- http://fam-tille.de