On 21/09/25 23:22, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
I have been contacted discretely and kindly requested to a) explicitly
mention crate name in email topic and b) cc additional contact points,
by the reasoning that the Rust team is too overwhelmed to handle their
packaging mailinglist.
I'm happy somebody did a), I thought about doing so myself a lot of
times. Being able to read the crate name in the subject helps us *a lot*
because it allows us to only open email we're interested in (or can act
upon, or should act upon). As for b), it's not that the Rust team is too
overwhelmed (well, maybe that too, but that's not the point). The
problem is that the alioth mailing list receives tens of emails every
day (I counted 90 yesterday, 21/9), i.e. it's the mailing list that's
overwhelmed. We tried to explain the BTS maintainers that this is
detrimental to our work, and that the solution for us is to also send
BTS maintainer emails to Uploaders [1], but they were not persuaded
(and/or have other reasons not to accept the request. I should also note
the bug in [1] will be 19 years old in a couple of weeks, so...).
The current state of affairs is: many team members are subscribed to the
alioth ML, but not all of them; some of them will read your bug report
in real time, but not many; if your bug is older than a few days, either
someone noticed it when it arrived in their mailbox and noted it down
(which we do), or somebody went looking for it (which we also do), or
somebody tracked it via alternative mechanisms (e.g. via the DDPO or by
subscribing to bugs, see also [2] for my pre-DD experience). Either
those or it's lost, and you need to ping us again. Fortunately, as I'm
sure you know, there are people like plugwash who do *a lot* of heavy
lifting in this area and keep the rust section of the archive overall in
good shape. Their work on its own mitigates a lot of these issues.
So the alioth mailing list is very much inhabited by humans and open to
bug-related conversation, but it is also extremely high traffic, thus
less suitable to human discussion. Which is why we move all discussion
not related to specific bugs to d-rust, which instead is very low traffic.
I am only happy if I was misinformed or misunderstood the request,
because it is much easier if I can file bugreports against Rust team
packages the same as any other Debian package.
Unfortunately, you were not misinformed nor you misunderstood (well,
except for details, maybe). I am sincerely sorry you need to go through
this quite meaningful extra burden, but until BTS maintainer email
starts to be forwarded to Uploaders this is the only effective way to
make sure bugs do not get lost and reach the people who need to see them
instead.
Cheers!
[1] See Blair's and my reports in
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=397761, not sure if
others did so too.
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=397761#57
