Hello, On Sun 09 Feb 2020 at 04:04AM -06, Michael Lustfield wrote: >> To make matters worse ftp-masters rarely leave their comments in ITP >> issues. As I've recently learned that have profound effect on processing of >> new packages. > > I personally think this sounds like a fantastic (and not very difficult) idea. AIUI, the reason REJECT comments aren't public is because it might sometimes make people feel embarassed. > I would personally *LOVE* to see ITPs be a requirement for *ALL* new packages. > Making it a requirement and expecting ftp-masters to ignore any upload until > the ITP has existed for at least X days would be absolutely fantastic. It would > fix some redundant library uploads (see golang/nodejs/etc.) and it would > provide a mandatory level of review by the wider community. ITPs are great for avoiding duplicated effort in most cases. However, there are cases in which it is possible for someone to know pretty much for sure that there is no chance of any duplicated effort. In such cases ITPs are busywork, which is demotivating to volunteers. For example, if I break out some mature code from a project and make its first upstream release as an independent library, and then I want immediately to upload it to NEW so that the next release of the project it was broken out from can depend on the new library, there is no reason to file an ITP. Since I am the upstream author and the code has only just been released, I can be confident no-one else is going to try to package it. Another example is the Haskell team. Due to the nature of the language, information on newly packaged libraries has to be committed to two different git repos, and so everyone working on Haskell in Debian is working from those two repos. So again, no real danger of duplicated effort. > Why do reviews take so long? > - The team is tiny > - Much of the team seems very burned out > - The ones that are active tend to stick to source or "unloved" tasks > - There are some very large and/or messy packages that need review > - There are a lot of redundant tasks and frequently-made mistakes > + A little more automation could help that > - (my opinion) The tools are archaic, cumbersome, and inefficient > + Fixing this would be a very (non-technically) difficult task > + An idea I have would help to bring transparency to the process... > ^ it's missing an interest requirement :( One key problem with the current workflow is that it makes it very difficult to avoid reviewing identical files more than once. That would be a big improvement. -- Sean Whitton
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature