[...] > > So, it is much better these to be detected and probably rejected > > before doing any more harm on their way. Low quality packages won't help > > users either, nor these users get the finally fixed and brought into > > relatively sane shape package faster. > > I'm quite sure that most of our users would value "getting all new > versions of important software a week earlier" higher than "get packages > later, but with less packaging bugs". As already pointed out in this > thread, lots of people use Ubuntu despite the (perceived) lower quality > of universe packages :P
I don't think that we should discuss the quality of Ubuntu in a Debian mailing list. They have different standards and different goals, that's it. Whether their quality is lower or higher is surely not as easy to judge and first and foremost not what we need to deal with a DDs. Lucas, you've done lots of work for improving the quality of Debian packages in the past, so I kind of wondered about the above statement. But anyway, I don't think that it is easy to substantiate your claim about "what our users would value". Personally, I really prefer high quality to "release quick and dirty", but that is definitely biased by my use of Debian on a larger number of production servers and client systems. I'd agree that quick and dirty is better than not being able to run at all on some fancy latest&greatest XYZbook. Still, I don't think we need to bring in that unknown $user, I think this thread is more about some impatient DDs sitting and waiting for their package to enter the archive. I doubt that many users turn to $Distro just because of NEW processing being a lot of work and thus taking too long. Which again, I cannot substantiate by any numbers. Instead of what has happened in most of this thread we should really start to listen to what ftp-masters and -assistants said (as part of this thread). They do have a profound understanding of what takes most of their time. If all of us would take just a bit more time to prepare that latest and greatest release (counting in myself) ftp-masters would just get to review nicely built packages and could focus on legal stuff, name clashes and the like. Instead, currently, they get distracted by many easy-to-spot errors (including lintian warnings/errors, which really doesn't require one to be an ftp-master to see...). We're currently asking the guys to review the contents of something full of spelling mistakes. Would you, yourself, be able to focus on the contents if you can hardly read it because of syntactical errors jumping at you? And, after all, the REJECT mail also requires a write-up of all those errors. Again, fewer errors means faster processing. Yes, packages sit in NEW for some time, maybe for too long. But as seen in both this thread and the qmail thread lately, packagers could take lot more care and thus take a lot of burden off of the FTP-team. If the team could rely on packages ending up in the NEW queue to be of appropriate quality, they would really only need to spend their time on legal gate-keeping. We can try to increase the number of people processing NEW, but we could really also balance part of the work across all DDs. Best, Michael
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