On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 09:02:18PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote: > On Saturday 31 May 2008, Luk Claes wrote: > > Ok, though I'd rather have a (strong) recommendation to prod > > maintainers (in a team or not), then to special case teams... > > Sure. For me it is not necessarily about "teams", but more about "active": > likely to respond and take care of urgent issues him/her/themselves when > prodded, thus making an NMU unnecessary. > > Basically I and several others have been asking to add something that > effectively (and more explicitly than in the current proposal) says: > > Please consider before you NMU if just contacting the maintainer isn't > likely to more effective than doing an NMU. > > In general it should be considered preferable that a maintainer > takes care of an issue himself and that he is given the chance to > review and correct your patch, because he can be expected to be more > aware of corner cases and complex interactions, things that an NMUer > might miss.
While I agree with this principle, I have one comment: IMO posting a patch (with explanation of what it fixes and why, and that an NMU to DELAYED has been uploaded) to the BTS is an appropriate way to notify the maintainer. There is no need to expect the upload to actually be ACCEPTED. In normal cases, either the maintainer uploads the fix (or a different one) him/herself, or the NMU does reach unstable. In the slightly exceptional case, the NMUer is asked to remove it from the queue. Note that this should mostly happen if the maintainer failed to document in the BTS why the bug is still open. I find this important for fixing mass-filed-bugs. They're all similar, the solutions probably are as well, and it would be too much (IMO) overhead to have to check who is maintaining the package. This is only about bugs which have had the "intent to NMU" in the BTS for some time before the upload hits unstable. I explicitly do want to allow (and not discourage) uploading to DELAYED at the same time as reporting the bug in the BTS, even for active teams. I don't see a problem, because active teams should handle the bug before the delay expires anyway. I think the big difference between this view and that of Frans is whether an upload to DELAYED should be considered an NMU. IMO it should not, it should only be seen as expressing the intent (which needs to be done sufficiently long before). (Since the DELAYED queue doesn't send notifications, this must of course also be done.) Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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