I've just been reading on the wiki that someone things there should be a pretesting branch for Debian, (good idea in my opinion), but why don't we try and stop rouge packages at unstable. Some maintainers obviously make mistakes every now and then while packaging "z", sometimes (if not all the time) the maintainer is generally unaware on any problems, so why not say the following:
In addition to testings requirements (x days, no more RC bugs than the last version, all builds up to date), why don't we say, that all packages need to be verified as "up to policy" and "installable/uninstallable" by say 2 different people, this could be made up of a separate team (as I'm not sure on the numbers of uploads that pass though unstable a week I can't really guess the size), this would not require members to be DD's just people that have been around enough to earn respect of RM's/FTPMasters etc... In my opinion this could help cut down on "Serious/Policy" RC bugs before release times, Grave/Whatever RC bugs due to uninstallability, etc... etc... Which would hence mean that RM's would have less triage work to do for RC bugs during release season, FTP Masters would not have to worry about the mass rushes of "hinting for removal" because, a fair few bugs could be prevented. Of course I do realize it has cons, some of them that I can think of now are: * With 11 arch's at present this would mean a fair few people would be required to do this and not get each other bored. * To introduce, it would need a lot of planning, and WAY more detailed thought process. * Unstable uploads aren't made in an organized manner (i.e exactly 1 every 5 minutes), and could hold up serious uploads. * Some packages may be *so* dangerous (i.e. they it's a really poorly made package making it via some way to perform rm -rdf /etc/init.d or something) that it may cause frustration for people "moderating" the queue * The cons most likely outweigh the pros. Anyway, this is just opinion and something that I thought of, it most likely could be turned upside down and inside out to make it a WAY better idea, and also, as I'm not a DD I may have misjudged some parts of the release process etc. In general: I don't mind what happens to this idea, if can be improved then by all means, if it can't feel free to scrap/ignore it. -- N Jones Proud Debian & FOSS User Debian Maintainer of: html2ps & ipkungfu
