Thursday 11 February 2016

Re: Archive Reorg Episode VII: Follow Build-Depends

On Feb 11, 2016, at 03:59 PM, Dmitry Shachnev wrote:

>I think most of the packages stuck in proposed are auto-synced from Debian
>(I really hope that Ubuntu developers who upload their packages specifically
>to Ubuntu do care about the migration of them). In this case there is almost
>nothing we can do to improve that situation anyway… (maybe advertising the
>excuses page a bit more so that more people look at it?)

I think there may be some opportunities for better push notifications for
things stuck in proposed, but there are plenty of little details to work out.
While I do keep an eye on excuses, it's something I've had to add to my daily
regimen and therefore it my attention to it can get distracted, at least until
I know there are things I'm expecting to see migrate.

It also takes some active work to figure out why something hasn't been
migrated. E.g. if a package is depwait, that's not immediately evident from
excuses, but I've learned that when excuses doesn't really tell me what the
problem is (e.g. the always helpful "Not considered"), I go to the source
package page on Launchpad to see why the build is being held up.

It seems like getting email notifications would help, and I'd personally like
them for packages which I've uploaded first to Debian, but of course not all
Debian developers would want Ubuntu notifications for autosyncs. (See?
details!)

Anyway, this is a different topic from the one Dimitri started, and I haven't
thought too deeply about it, so I'll leave it there. In general I'm +1 on the
original proposal, as MIRing build-deps and adding artificial deltas from
Debian are a maintenance burden, especially given the work involved in merging
or the costs in lagging behind Debian.

Cheers,
-Barry