Hi, For years, the DAM and NEW queues have been the major source of frustration in the Debian community. Several attempts have been made to improve the situation, but the problems have never been really solved so far. And the queues are again in a bad state.
First, DAM: there are 19 prospective DDs waiting for DAM approval and 2 for account creation. Some of them have been FD-approved a very, very long time ago: Alexander Gerasiov has been FD-approved on 2009-01-10, and Asheesh Loria on 2008-12-22 (but apparently, because of an unanswered RC bug, DAM postponed approving him a month ago). This make a lot of skilled people just decide not to apply for DD, because it takes too long, and is too frustrating. I'm sure that many of the current DD would just give up if they were asked to show the same patience and commitment as the current applicants. And no, the fact that some of us went through similar delays is not a reason not to make the Debian community slightly more attractive :-) Then NEW. Nothing out of the ordinary here: NEW delays are often raised on -devel@ (see [1] for example), and it's apparently considered normal to wait 2 or more weeks before one's package gets reviewed. Since this often blocks other works, it is a major source of slowdown in Debian. Of course, it happens that the NEW queue is nearly empty and processed almost daily[2], but we depend on the free time of too few people, so good times never last. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/03/msg01556.html [2] http://molly.corsac.net/~corsac/debian/new/ It is clear, based on the previous attempts to solve those problems, that simply throwing more manpower on the DAM and ftpmasters team won't solve those problems. We have tried that for years, and it has failed for years. We need to compromise on the level of quality we expect from our prospective DDs and new packages. We need to accept that new maintainers are humans, and will sometimes make mistakes, no matter how many questions you ask them. And that packages with licensing problems will continue to be uploaded to Debian despite all the checking done by ftpmasters: licence problems are already being introduced in packages that already went through NEW (through the addition of new code in existing packages, for example). We put a lot of energy into processes that are not totally efficient. We should seek processes that scale. For example: - the NM process could be reduced to 5 to 10 questions choosen by the AM amongst the 50+ questions currently in the NM templates, to verify that the applicant has some knowledge about different aspects of Debian packaging. Then the AM would ask for comments about the applicant from other DDs, like it is already being done for DM. That would make the AM report a lot shorter to read, and spread the load on all DDs, that would have to write recommandation emails about the applicant (including links to work the applicant has done). It would also help avoid socially-problematic applicants, because it would be a de-facto requirement to work with several other DDs before becoming a DD. - the NEW queue could also be based on peer-review: one could ask one or two another DDs to certify that the package is OK (licensing-wise) to be uploaded to unstable. Then ftpmasters would just be responsible for verifying that enough DDs have reviewed the package. And ftpmasters could still choose some "interesting" packages and check them manually. Of course, this will lead to buggy packages being uploaded to Debian. But that is already the case, and Debian has never been sued so far, AFAIK. It will also create a culture of asking for reviews from other maintainers, which, in the long term, could help improve the quality of the distribution as a whole. The above proposals are just examples. I'm not expecting them to be adopted without changes, but I hope that the possibility of wide changes in the NM and NEW processes will be discussed. One possibility to move forward in this discussion could be to have a poll, to know how DD currently feel about those problems, and if we should really seek solutions, or if the status quo satisfies everybody. -- | Lucas Nussbaum | lu...@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ | | jabber: lu...@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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