On 10/11/16 08:26, Christoph Biedl wrote: > Ian Jackson wrote... > >> I think what is really worrying people is the fear that they might >> miss something, for good reasons, and then find that their work that >> they care about is thrown out of stretch. >> >> It is difficult to address this fear with logical arguments intended >> to demonstrate that "it won't happen to a responsible maintainer", >> because it is so easy to think of scenarios where, at the very least, >> it's hard to be sure that the right things would happen. > > For me it's a bit different. If John S.(lacker) Maintainer ignored the > messages about debhelper compat 4 removal for ten and about the > openssl 1.1 transition for seven months, and in January suddenly finds > his packages got kicked out and cannot return for stretch - he had it > coming. > > If however Jane R.(esponsible) Maintainer did everything right but did > not realize somebody else's non-action affects her packages as well, > through a build dependency or whatever ... until the "Your package was > removed from testing" e-mail arrives: That's quite a nuisance. > > So if I, in Jane's position, could be certain I'll learn about a > pending removal that affects my packages early enough I can avoid this > (by kicking the maintainer or NMU), my concerns were neglectable. A > grace period of just a few days was sufficient. This mechanism is > implemented for install dependencies, but after reading this thread > I'm not sure it exists for other scenarios as well. > >> On the other hand, it would be really easy for the Release Team to >> address this fear. All they have to say is that if there is a really >> good excuse (maintainer seriously ill; build-dependency broken and >> maintainer not notified; or whatever), they will be willing to >> consider exceptions. > > I guess the Release Team plays tough in the first place so people do > their job *now* instead of asking for exceptions later. I'd call that > wise tactics. The e-thing still might happen if there's really, really > good reason. But creating false hope sends the wrong signal. > > Finally, there's a thing called "trust": I trust the Release Team does > this solely in order to keep the freeze time as short as possible, > everybody hates that time anyway. This trust was created by the very > people behind it, and the way they acted in the past months.
+1. And yes, we will give exceptions on a case by case basis, as we have always done. Also, as has been noted in this thread, it looks like some processes could be improved (e.g. notifying rdeps when removing a package from unstable). Let's see what affects the release process and then let's try to improve those things. Cheers, Emilio
