Hi, Thank you Andrew, Mechtilde, Reinhard, Emmanuel and Nicolas for contributing to Debian by taking care of reviewing all packages in the NEW queue since mid-January, as members of the DFSG team.
I am really glad to see this, and it hugely motivates me personally to continue contributing to Debian. About a year ago I was full of enthusiasm when going full-time into Debian development, but that quickly faded as I noticed that the majority of my work was bottlenecked by the NEW queue. It not only affected the packaging work I did myself, but also the dozen or so people I was mentoring. Nearly all of them had something that needed to go through NEW, either as an actual new package, or new binary, or source package rename. With one of my mentees we renamed src:godot to src:godot3 and had to wait over 8 months for that to get a review in NEW. Many of these mentees lost interest in Debian waiting for NEW, but I am hopeful I can convince them to come back now that the long - and unpredictable - wait times are no longer common. Note that I am not blaming the *one* person who did all the NEW queue reviewing before. He surely went above and beyond in his role. This was an organisational failure that the NEW queue was the burden of only one person. Thanks also to Andreas who as the DPL took Debian through this long and painful, but necessary change. I attended a meeting on this topic in DebConf25 and saw that there were 25+ concerned attendees in person listening in to the discussions between the DPL and the FTP Masters team on how to solve the NEW queue, among other related issues. I am not aware of everything that happened, but I imagine Andreas spent a large part of 2025 trying to get this aspect fixed in Debian. By doing so he also set an example on how the DPL, with the legitimacy and authority of being voted to represent all of Debian, can successfully untangle organisational issues when they have gotten in a state that they won't get fixed by themselves. As of today the NEW queue seems to be down to just six packages from six hundred in early 2026. The stats from the last two months at https://ftp-master.debian.org/stat.html speak for themselves. In addition to the reviews themselves, I can see at https://salsa.debian.org/dfsg-team/dfsg-new-queue/-/graphs/main how much effort was put into creating the new portal at https://dfsg-new-queue.debian.org/ In the portal I am glad to see the effort was distributed among multiple people: - https://dfsg-new-queue.debian.org/users/awm 567 reviews - https://dfsg-new-queue.debian.org/users/mechtilde 487 reviews - https://dfsg-new-queue.debian.org/users/siretart 119 reviews - https://dfsg-new-queue.debian.org/users/eamanu 42 reviews - https://dfsg-new-queue.debian.org/users/babelouest 17 reviews Now that the new team seems to be operating, and the processes are in place, hopefully more people can take steps towards joining it so that the load is shared among enough people that no individual is overly burdened for extensive periods. I am also sure that there is still a lot of work ahead in optimizing and automating the review process further, so it can continue to be fast, efficient while uncovering more issues and thus strengthening the reputation of Debian of being diligent in this type of matters. - Otto
