Simon Huggins's blog

Fri, 19 May 2006

Everything old is NEW again

So it's been 16 days and counting since I posted about our uploads for the new beta of xfce4. During that time I've had four users file bugs asking why it's uninstallable and why apt is keeping packages back. I've had many users pop by #debian-xfce or #xfce and ask what the status is. I have to just tell them to be patient but it's a bit dull now.

NEW processing has been so good for such a long time that to be honest I'd forgotten what waiting was like. Last time the xfce team did a soname change for a library it took 2 days (March 2005), the last times we uploaded an entirely new source it took 1 day (October 2005), 1 week (November 2005), 1 day (December 2005), 1 week (end of December 2005), 2 days (January 2006), even just 2 days to split the -mixer package.

For entirely new packages I don't really care how long it takes them to enter the archive. But for just a simple soname change it seems a shame that it takes so long. I spoke briefly to Joerg on IRC and offered my help. After all, obviously I have the best taste in the world and it can't be too hard to spot the soname changes and just accept them, spot the people with claimed licenses that don't match the headers in the source and reject them and defer anything hard to Joerg can it? But he didn't comment on that bit just said he was at debconf (and debcamp before). Everyone in Debian is a volunteer and everyone deserves a holiday but it's frustrating when there are bottlenecks down to there only being one person doing one job. I'd suggest that the queue be split into entirely new never seen before sources and the rest but I guess that would mean changing dak. Given the list isn't processed in order I don't see why adding more people with good taste would be a bad idea.

I looked at prodding helena (from dak) to give me more information but will look more this weekend - setting up the test environment is going to be the hardest part of patching it I think.

Oh yeah, apologies to ER for the title of this post but I bought the box set and am going back through season 1-3 (i.e. when it was still good ;)). Also hello Planet Debian. I've been vaguely blogging elsewhere but hopefully if I got the feed right you'll just see the bits tagged for you.

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