I've recently been trying to help rescue a package that is dropped for
Trixie, partly for technical reasons (source package split means a round
trip through NEW) and party for license reasons (some uncertainty about
copyright of some icons, which have been in the archive for decades, but
since a NEW round-trip is required, this is a reject-worthy bug now)
On Mon Mar 10, 2025 at 7:57 AM GMT, Luke Faraone wrote:
We discard the source tarballs and changes files on REJECT so there is
nothing to `debdiff`. This partially happens for legal reasons: if we
determine a package is not suitable for the archive then we may no
longer have the legal right to retain it on ftp-master.
That makes sense. In my case, I still don't have access to the source
package that was rejected, but that could be solved if the (very busy)
maintainer uploaded it somewhere else (e.g. to Salsa). Since it's never
been in Debian (technically), there's no historic packages to look at
(yet).
The rationale given when I joined as ftpassistant (c. 2012) for not
publicising decisions e.g. in the ITP was to avoid publishing
potentially harshly-worded and embarassing reviews to maintainers in
public (like pointing out that you missed a fairly obvious license
declaration, incompatibility, or packaging step).
I am welcome to feedback from the project as to whether this outweighs
the benefit to having past decisions available for public consultation.
I had to ask nicely for someone with privileges to send me the ftp team
reject notes to get some clue as to what needs fixing. So I would
definitely prefer if they were open by default.
Thanks for your efforts!
--
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👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland
✎ j...@debian.org
🔗 https://jmtd.net
