[Not cc'ed to "herrn" release assistants]

So, continuing on.

Your second assignments, should you choose to accept them, come in
three parts: followup of last week's bugs, a new set of bugs to solve,
and finding and filing some unreported bugs.

Followup basically means making sure that the "solution" you've found
actually gets implemented, that the bug doesn't regress, and that there
aren't any new problems introduced by the fix, and should hopefully be
straightforward.

We're also going to be looking for some unreported RC bugs to make
sure they get fixed. We'll be focussing on the issues discovered by
the testing scripts for this, since there are plenty of these and they
generally don't require too much creativity to uncover. Basically, you'll
given a couple of package names that are listed way down the bottom of
the update_excuses page, and be expected to work out why they have sat in
unstable so long, and what, if anything, should be done about it. Eg:

     * zope-worldpilot (- to 1.0.4-1)
          + Maintainer: Behan Webster
          + 1022 days old (needed 10 days)
          + Valid candidate   

is sitting at the bottom of update_excuses at the moment. It doesn't have
any obvious failures (no RC bugs, no build failures), so we need to look
at update_output, which says:

trying: zope-worldpilot
skipped: zope-worldpilot (1000+8)
    got: 24+0: a-4:a-6:h-6:i-8
    * i386: zope-worldpilot

which indicates that zope-worldpilot is uninstallable on i386. Looking
at the unstable Packages.gz file, we see:

        Package: zope-worldpilot
        Version: 1.0.4-1
        Depends: zope

and

        Package: zope
        Version: 2.6.1-0.10
        Conflicts: [...], zope-worldpilot (<= 1.0.4-1), [...]

Looking at the open bugs, we see that it's been uninstallable for over
a year (122653, 123198) and the maintainer isn't interested in doing
uploads anymore (151925). So we upgrade the reports to serious so we'll
see them in the RC bug list later if more action needs to be taken,
and file an `Orphaned' bug against wnpp about the package.

Some possible ways to get these sorts of problems moving are: 

        * get the maintainer talking to whoever he needs to be talking
          to -- file a bug, send a mail to a mailing list, whatever

        * mark the package as unmaintained, so that it can be adopted or
          removed

        * get the porters to try building the package again if it was just
          a bug in one of the buildds

There's some explanation of the entirely opaque update_* files generated
by the testing scripts at http://www.debian.org/devel/testing . You may
wish to ssh to auric to browse the files locally or you might want to
add a ".gz" to the URLs to get the compressed versions (they're very
large). If that's not enough to get you going, ask questions.

Without further ado:

Neil Schemenauer
         56472 followup: has patch been accepted? is NMU useful?
         80888 followup: work out what to do about this package
        119851 followup: NMU needed; should package be marked as orphaned?
        143852 followup: response from the maintainer needed
        148726 [       ] libsasl-gssapi-heimdal dependency problems
        151753 [       ] korganizer: Rebuild with libpisock5

        um-pppd, ttthreeparser, amp

Colin Watson
         84493 followup: has fix introduced any new bugs?
        104835 followup: has maintainer noticed the patch?
        116149 followup: has report been closed?
        146103 followup: any progress on 186299?
        149460 [       ] perhaps race condition when bringing multiple tap ...
        150411 [P      ] xshipwars-server: POSIX shell incompatibilities
        151461 [       ] device3dfx-source: fails to build

        ipautofw, qcam, ginaccint

Steve Langasek
         92810 [       ] doc-rfc: license is not DFSG-free
        133563 [ +     ] FTBFS: Build failure of doc-rfc on i386
        143547 [  H    ] perl segfaults during configure stage
        144841 [       ] doesn't build on arm
        150692 [       ] keeps inflating on startup with non-ascii chars in LANG
        184302 [       ] sqsh_2.1-4(mipsel/unstable): out of date ...

        hamfax, lodju, astrolog

Federico Di Gregorio
         56713 [       ] dip: No cleanup after exit, duplicate route and ...
        105052 [       ] Build failure on hppa (at least)
        123306 [       ] ginaccint doesn't build from source
        127604 [ +     ] segfaults while building on alpha or ia64
        143985 [ +     ] muse_0.5.2-1.1(hppa/unstable): links non-PIC code ...
        173240 [ +     ] nowebm: Insecure /tmp usage

        icomlib, xbs, xsnow

James A Morrison
         46709 followup: why is GNU Mach 2.0 unpackaged/unreleased?
        115325 followup: has fix introduced any new bugs?
        147290 followup: has fix been accepted?
        143825 [P      ] xutils: why is rstart.real a conffile?
        151071 [       ] gem_0.87-4(unstable/arm): missing build-depends, ...
        151551 [       ] gspy: crashes at startup

        trn, font3d, xgobi

If you find there's too much there for you to get a handle on in one
week, just do what you can. If what's listed seems a bit light, feel
free to pick up a couple more bugs or packages and work on those too;
I'm just guessing at what's a reasonable number of bugs and packages
to give you.  Again, make sure everything you find out is sent to the
bug tracking system, and once you've done that, send a brief summary in
reply to this mail.

Our eventual aim is to have no outstanding RC bugs that are more than
a few days old, and at most maybe a couple of weeks. Likewise, we don't
want packages to sit in unstable and be refused from testing for months
or years without a bug report being filed. Likewise, we don't want
unmaintained and buggy software sitting neglected in unstable.

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

  ``Dear Anthony Towns: [...] Congratulations -- 
        you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified Engineer!''

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