To start with, congratulations to the ftpmasters for keeping up with the NEW queue. Unfortunately, this email is going to be a case of damning with faint praise....
I'm seeing bugs which were filed as removal requests as early as August 14 which are still waiting for processing. Unfortunately, they are really beginning to pile up; there are slightly over 100 now, so I think it will take quite a lot of work to catch up. As for the bugs requesting change of priorities in the Overrides file, many appear to simply be ignored permanently. #263887 is the canonical example. I recommend eliminating the overrides file for packages of priority 'standard' and lower, and instead always allowing package maintainers to set their own package priority among 'extra', 'optional', and 'standard', As for bugs requesting stuff which actually needs the manual touch of an ftpmaster, like #224469, they're also ignored. I pinged in August. This bug, for which a trivial solution was described in December 2005, is getting rather urgent; once woody is removed from ftpmaster.debian.org and moved to archive.debian.org, it will be a license violation issue. It's really rather discouraging that the ftpmasters have not fixed this. FTPmaster is *still* one of the biggest bottlenecks in the whole of Debian. (The other one is DAM; "0 applicants became maintainers."). It needs more people, specifically on the routine processing of removals, new packages, and override changes, so that the existing highly-qualified people can focus on the more unusual and complicated problems. There's really no good reason for the removal requests to be delayed like this. There are plenty of people who are competent to go through removal requests and process them, starting with some of the more careful QA people. You don't need to give full ftpmaster powers out in order to do that; set up a system where DDs on the 'privileged list' can trigger package removal, much like DDs on the right 'privileged list' can hint packages into testing. It should be pretty easy to set up for someone who understands the DAK scripts, since it seems that the scripts do most of the removal work already. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
