Hi all,
I am in strong favor of 1., letting BTS forward to Uploaders. I'm
Uploader for a few tens of (team-maintained) packages, most of which I
don't particularly care about since I only introduced them as
dependencies, and I'm not going to subscribe to all of them. Still, I do
feel responsible for their well-being, so I really don't understand why
I shouldn't (and don't) receive bug reports that concern them.
At this stage, this is how it's worked for me. I introduce a package in
Debian (usually within some team, which means the team is Maintainer and
I'm Uploader), I wait for it to pass the NEW queue, then if I care
enough about it (which usually means it's a leaf package instead of a
dependency) I subscribe to it. Then I wait for the confirmation email, I
answer with an acceptance email (which the PTS requires) and I archive
the confirmation email so as not to clog my incoming folder. Finally I
create a folder and a filter for the corresponding tracker.d.o mailing
list so that the tens of emails I receive each day from Debian-related
activities can remain manageable. I'm not going to do this dance for
every single package for which I am Uploader. I am very happy to do it
for those I actually care about, and for those only.
At present the way I've dealt with bugs in packages for which I'm
Uploader (but to which I'm not subscribed) is either by reading every
single bug report addressed to the Team mailing list -- of which there
are very many, so I don't actually know if I always caught them this
way; additionally, being Uploader for tens of packages, I may not
immediately remember all their names -- or by periodically checking for
the bug count in the "Bugs" column in my DDPO -- which assumes I
remember the bug count of every package I am Uploader for [1]. In the
latter case there is no time frame for when that will happen.
Additionally, it happened to me a few times that I filed (or engaged
with) bugs for packages whose maintainer was listed as Uploader, which
resulted in them simply being unaware of the bug. This included one bug
at severity grave (fortunately unrelated to security, and probably
better classified as serious) which went unanswered for ~ 1 month and
because of which a number of autoremovals (including of packages I
co-maintain) were scheduled. Because of this I spent weeks monitoring
that bug, until I finally realized what was happening and cc'ed the
actual maintainer, who then answered saying he was completely unaware of
the bug and solved it within less than an hour.
I don't think option 3., add the option to subscribe to a package on
BTS, is enough. It should be automatic. Maybe option 2., let PTS
automatically subscribe maintainers to packages they are Uploaders of,
could do, but since PTS sends email notifications for far more stuff
than bug reports we should really just want to have at least 1.
(automatic BTS submissions) at the bare minimum. I don't personally feel
the need to have more options.
Cheers!
[1] Which incidentally I do at this time, but this is just a lucky and
temporary coincidence made possible by my knowledge that there's a
single bug I can't close at present, so the others are those I should
actively engage with.
