Re: Fixed release dates are hurting quality

[Wouter Verhelst]

So.

On Sun, Feb 07, 2021 at 01:40:39PM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> I just noticed how maintainers are NMU'ing packages in large quantities to
> get them somehow in a usable state for the release. The packages get small
> patches so that they are more or less working and can get into testing,
> despite the packages being untouched for a long time in some cases meaning
> there is no guarantee for quality.

I was one of these maintainers.

gridengine has been in Debian since 2008, and the version in Buster
works well. I don't have time to maintain it, but I do use it often, and
some of the work I do for the debconf and FOSDEM video teams relies on
it being available.

It was pointed out to me shortly before the freeze that it was not in
bullseye because of a "FTBFS with gcc-10" bug for which a (rather
trivial) patch was already available. Unfortunately it turned out that
that patch wasn't sufficient, so I had to repeat the pattern one more
time to make it work. The patch is *still* very trivial though.

There is now a gridengine package in Bullseye again, and it works as
well as it did in Buster.

I don't agree with the statement that doing things like this is a bad
idea. Sometimes doing the minimal necessary to make a package work again
so that our future needs will still be served by it is a good idea. I
think that this is one of those times, and I guess that it's the same
for most of the packages uploaded like that.

-- 
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Re: Next attempt to add Blends to Debian installer

[Paul Sutton]

On 02/03/2021 13:46, Andreas Tille wrote:

Hi Steve,

On Thu, Oct 08, 2020 at 10:23:19AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:

Hey Andreas! I hope you're keeping well!

On Tue, Oct 06, 2020 at 06:08:02PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:

(Overdue!) update: I've been hacking on this for a while, and I hope
to have a prototype for testing up shortly. It works fine on my local
system, but in a test d-i build it fails totally so I've clearly
missed something! Debugging that now...


I wonder whether I might have missed some information whether there
is something I could test meanwhile.


I'm afraid that various higher-priority interrupts came up (new job,
UEFI security work) and I got side-tracked for a while. You must be
psychic - I just started picking things up again last weekend.


I admit I did not payed much attention on the development of tasksel and
thus the chances to select Blends right from the installer.  The topic
remains to be urgent for all Blends - but I'm afraid it will be to late
for Debian 10.  Or did I missed something and the status is promising
for this release?

Kind regards and thanks for all your attempts anyway

   Andreas.

This would be a great feature and very welcome be able to do more with 
tasksel.  Maybe we can come up with other ideas, as if it is going to be 
updated, then make sure the features are there.


Or given the number of blends, we need to come up with the most 
important / popular ones to include, last thing you want is a huge list.


Regards

Paul


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Re: Fixed release dates are hurting quality

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz]

On 3/3/21 9:09 AM, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> I don't agree with the statement that doing things like this is a bad
> idea. Sometimes doing the minimal necessary to make a package work again
> so that our future needs will still be served by it is a good idea. I
> think that this is one of those times, and I guess that it's the same
> for most of the packages uploaded like that.

Sure, you don't have to agree with my stance on this. I think it's better
to not ship something at all than to ship something with a hotpatch that
hasn't been touched for a long time.

After all, users expect packages that are shipped with a release to meet
certain quality standards and I would say that chances are not zero that
such a package which hasn't been touched for a longer time will have other
problems that may warrant further action of the security team in the future.

But ok, maybe my thinking is too much influenced from the SLES release process
at SUSE which ships with a rather limited set of packages which are guaranteed
to work and are officially supported.

Adrian

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Bug#984461: ITP: fnt -- Font downloader/manager

[Gürkan Myczko]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Gürkan Myczko 
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org

* Package name: fnt
  Version : 1.1
  Upstream Author : Alex Myczko 
* URL : https://github.com/alexmyczko/fnt
* License : MIT
  Description : Font downloader/manager
 Search, preview, and download more than 1800 fonts as user.

I plan to improve that thing quite a bit, but prefer to package this
within the debian fonts team.

Bug#984462: RFH: open-build-service

[Andrej Shadura]

Package: wnpp
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, Andrew Lee (李健秋) 
, Debian Ruby Extras Maintainers 


Hi,

While I don’t work on the OBS package in Debian, I know about the state
of the package in Debian right now: the team, and most notably the main
maintainer, Andrew Lee, need help to maintain this package, as it
requires a lot of work due to a combination of Ruby / Ruby on Rails,
Perl and shell bits. Ruby parts specifically is a pain point, since
there’s a lot of gems this package depends on and updating one or
multiple of them can break OBS in ways the upstream didn’t think about.

The package has already missed Buster and Bullseye, and if the situation
doesn’t improve, it may result in a removal at some point.

Unfortunately, I lack necessary knowledge of the Ruby ecosystem to be
able to meaningfully help myself, but this package needs more people to
work on it, so if you can help, please consider doing so.

Thanks!

-- 
Cheers,
  Andrej

Bug#984483: ITP: pyfltk -- Python bindings for FLTK

[Dima Kogan]

Package: wnpp
Owner: Dima Kogan 
Severity: wishlist

* Package name: pyfltk
  Version : 1.3.5
  Upstream Author : Andreas Held, Clemmitt Sigler, Robert Arkiletian
* URL or Web page : https://pyfltk.sourceforge.io/
* License : LGPL-2
  Description : Python bindings for FLTK

This was removed from Debian earlier, but I need it, and I'd like to
bring it back.

RM bug: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=870935

Unclear what the core problem was other than inactive maintainership.



Previous attempt to bring it back:

  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=921403

  https://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2019/02/msg00036.html

Robert: are you still interested in doing this? If so, we can
collaborate, and I can sponsor. Otherwise, I'll just do this myself.