On Fri, 2018-03-02 at 22:05 -0600, Steve Robbins wrote: > I assume that the reason my packages have been processed is due to one > > of two reasons: a) I get quoted on LWN several times a year, so I'm a > > celebrity and get special treatment > > I expect that's it.
For the avoidance of doubt, especially for onlookers: I was, of course, being sarcastic with that LWN command, and I think Steve is continuing by being deadpan sarcastic in response. I wish text/plain carried font information so I could use a font to indicate when I'm being sarcastic (Times, Helvetica, or Courier). > Or possibly you have a more generous notion of "fast". Currently there are > five or six dozen packages waiting more than 2 months. That's not fast in my > books. By "fast" I mean "less than 24 hours". I uploaded vmdb2 (new source package) about a month ago. The timestamp of the mail saying it's going into the NEW queue is 16:27. The ACCEPTED mail has a timestamp of 18:00. That was on February 10. Admittedly, it is quite a small package, but that's kind-of my point. Making it easy for others to do the thing you need them to do is what you can do to make things easier for you. Asking them to do more work, or to change how they do their thing, is less likely to go well. The Linux kernel maintainers flat-out reject large patches that dump big changes without prior discussion. This is because it's easier for them to digest changes in smaller chunks, and they put the responsibility for presenting the changes that way on the people producing the patches. For Debian, I think we should have the same approach. Not literally the same approach, of course, since that would mean having the Debian package maintainer refactor the upstream code into smaller programs, and that would just be silly. But the same approach of making it the uploader's responsibility to present a new package in a way that makes it easy to review it. This includes making copyright information easy, and working with upstream to make it clear, possibly by using SPDX markup for copyrights and licensing. For all of Debian it meants finding or developing tools for automating extraction of copyright information into debian/copyright in whatever manner is needed. We have licencecheck, and if that isn't good enough, we can improve it. There may be other reasons why some packages stay in NEW for a long time. Getting information from ftp masters about the reasons why, and a discussion of how we can make easier for them to make NEW review easier would, I feel, take us forward better than another than us complaining that things are taking too long.
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