On Monday, December 6, 2021 8:58:15 AM EST Andreas Tille wrote: > Hi Jonas, > > I've thought that it is probably not my turn to answer your questions > but since there was no answer yet I'd like to report from my experience. > > Am Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 05:21:45PM +0100 schrieb Jonas Smedegaard: > > Is "Age" used to rank processing of NEW requests? > > I have some evidence that "Age" is at least not the only ranking > factor for processing NEW requests. I've made the experience that > the following hints are well perceived by ftpmaster: > > 1. Package in new fixes RC bug #xy > 2. Package has just a new binary name and might be easier > to process than other packages > 3. Package has some importance for reason XY (this worked > extremely well in April last year when we had the Debian > Med Covid-19 sprint - I observed processing times less > than 24 hours and I can't say frequently enough how thankful > I am about this > > It is not always clear to me what channel is best for submitting > those hints. IRC usefully works nicely, but not always. Responding > to the mail that a package is in new can be helpful as well. For > the Covid-19 sprint we had setup a dedicated Wiki page. > > > Is that documented somewhere? > > As far as I know it is not documented. > > > Or alternatively, do anyone have some (non cargo cult) > > empirical knowledge about that? > > See above about my experience with ranking. I also think that my habit > to say thank you to ftpmaster whenever there is a sensible chance is > also a good way to motivate ftpmaster to do a work which I personally > would consider not the most thrilling task on my own desk. It probably > helps more than telling that ftpmaster is slow in working down the > queue. So: Thank you to ftpmaster for processing the queue. > > However, I wished at least one member of ftpmaster team would lurk here > on this list to clarify questions like these. What I was explicitly > told by more than one ftpmaster is that kind of "free text" e-mails in > their mailbox tend to be forgotten in the large amount of so many mails > to this mailbox I can not even imagine. Thus I do not ftpmaster in my > response which I would usually do in cases like this.
Speaking only for myself here, not the team as a whole: The tools we use default to age order, so if one just starts working through packages in the order given, it's oldest first. Personally, I rather rarely do that. I don't have a lot of time for this (I'm only recently returned from a hiatus in fact) and so I try to focus on packages of types that I'm more familiar with so that I can accomplish more with the time I do have. I took time off of $work to focus on New for the COVID-19 sprint because I thought it was important, so that level of service should not be generally expected. It was a very special case. IRC (#debian-ftp) works best for me. It's actually less likely to get lost than email. Scott K
