new packages freeze policy

[Jordan Mantha]

On 8/30/07, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> Le jeudi 30 août 2007 à 21:51 +0200, Stefan Potyra a écrit :
> > Hi,
> >
> > it seems that there has been a misunderstanding of the new packages freeze
> > (NPF) policy between archive admins and the MOTU team: While MOTU's assumed
> > that any package in the new queue until new packages freeze will get
> > processed, Tollef explained that the packages freeze for archive admins mean
> > that new processing is merely stopped at NPF (apart from exceptions).
>
> hi,
>
> The archive admin members quickly discussed this and the packages
> uploaded before the freeze will be reviewed (no need of an uvf
> exception) for this cycle. Soren has updated the wiki to clarify that
> the packages should be uploaded some time before the freezes and that
> the archive team can take some extra days to process those
>

Thank you Sebastien and the rest of the archive admin team for
considering and clarifying this.

It's going to be a bit more confusing for people as there will be a
quite a bit of uncertainty in if their packages will make it or not.
This would me with the current NEW queue that ~25 packages would not
make it in without exceptions, even though they were uploaded up to 2
weeks ago. That unpredictibilty is a bit discouraging for our
contributors. They have made the effort to get a package on REVU that
has been acked by 2 MOTUs and uploaded, only to see it miss the Freeze
because it wasn't processed. I think 2 weeks is perfectly acceptable
for processing NEW, I just think contributors need some sort of
guarantee that if *they* get their work done by some time then their
packages will be processed.

On the other hand, we do have a freeze exception process in place, and
the most accurate determination of whether a package makes it into the
archive is ubuntu-archive processing it, *not* uploading it to NEW.
Also, now that I think about it, this allows some time to fix quick
mistakes and get them reuploaded in time to still get processed,
rather than just getting a Rejected email after the Freeze the last
minute.

What we need now is a clear statement in MOTU Land on this policy and
how we are going to do Freeze exceptions for this. Perhaps we should
also have our own internal "Slush" where we stop uploading to NEW
mostly and focus on making sure the stuff in NEW actually makes it
into the archive. Thoughts?

Thanks for supporting MOTU efforts. Sorry if I seemed a bit cranky on IRC.

-Jordan (aka LaserJock)