Dear FTP-masters and -assistants, I hereby request that you contact the Debian Installer team [1] before accepting packages from the NEW queue that: - introduce a new udeb - are *not* maintained by the D-I team (i.e. do not have the Maintainer: field set to debian-boot@lists.debian.org)
The reason for the limitation in the second condition is that packages that are team maintained can be expected to be maintained in the D-I SVN repository and will thus already have been reviewed by the team. Rationale --------- We have over the past year increasingly seen udebs being uploaded to and accepted in the archive for which there had been no prior discussion with the Debian Installer team. For the following reasons the uncoordinated addition of udebs to the archive is undesirable: - the debian-installer section of the archive was created exclusively for debian-installer; this was recently confirmed by the tech-ctte - there is a significant release management cost to any package that has udebs, both for the D-I release manager and the Debian release managers; there are plans to improve that, but those are not yet implemented - unannounced udebs will not automatically be blocked from migration to testing, which is currently necessary because the migration of udebs requires semi-manual action - new udebs are currently included by default in official CD images, unneeded udebs are excluded by adding them to a list; having uncoordinated new udebs makes maintaining that list harder - packaging udebs correctly, especially when it comes to libraries or getting dependencies on libraries correct, is not trivial and most maintainers do not have any experience with that; therefore a review of the package by the D-I team before it is uploaded is very much desired We are happy to discuss additions of udebs to the archive with anybody (for example developers of derived distributions), but we really would like an end the unannounced appearance of udebs. Recent examples: - http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gambas2/news/20070715T141328Z.html - http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gnu-fdisk/news/20070709T220716Z.html TIA, Frans Pop [1] At debian-boot@lists.debian.org
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