Re: Potential issues for most ports (Was: Re: Bits from the Release Team (Jessie freeze info))

On Tue, 05 Nov 2013, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Well, I did ask for the creation of port-specific tags back at
> debconf8 (if I'm not mistaken), but you told me to go for usertags
> instead ;-)

Sounds familiar. Usertags have the advantage of not requiring me to do
any work. But presumably at the time I hadn't thought of the
difficulties of coordinating all of the different usertags between
porters.
 
> Yes, I think that's a good idea; it would avoid issues where
> maintainers are waiting on porters and vice versa, since the
> reassigning of a bug to a port pseudopackage would make it clear who's
> waiting for whom. Additionally, it would allow porters to have a todo
> list of things that need to be done for their port but aren't specific
> to any one package (or of which the root cause hasn't been found yet,
> e.g., "recently compiled binaries segfault, but we don't know why
> yet")
> 
> If you're going down this road, I would appreciate it if ports listed on
> debian-ports.org would also be getting pseudopackages.

Since they would all be under the same ports.debian.org (or similar)
namespace, I wouldn't have a problem with it. [My main concern about
pseudopackages is polluting the package namespace; since I can't imagine
anyone ever wanting to create a package called someport.ports.debian.org
for a sane reason, that shouldn't be a big deal.]

It would also be possible (in the meantime) for bugs to be assigned to
both the port-specific pseudopackage, and the original package which
spawned the bug.

In any event, if a few active porters wouldn't mind creating a wishlist
bug against bugs.debian.org for this with a suggested course of action,
I'd appreciate it. Assuming there is no significant disagreement about
that course of action, I'd like to implement it within a week or so.

-- 
Don Armstrong                      http://www.donarmstrong.com

PowerPoint is symptomatic of a certain type of bureaucratic
environment: one typified by interminable presentations with lots of
fussy little bullet-points and flashy dissolves and soundtracks masked
into the background, to try to convince the audience that the goon
behind the computer has something significant to say.
 -- Charles Stross _The Jennifer Morgue_ p33