Fri, 09 Jul 2004

Murphy and the GNOME 2.6 transition

Last evening, the release guys were doing simulations on the cupsys stuff, and everything looked well: qt3 has been accepted in Sarge, thus unblocking kdelibs. The Samba RC bug had been temporarily downgraded to help things a bit. Everything looked bright, and the release team started thinking the transition would be complete in yesterday's testing run... until we spotted a gimp-print upload in incoming. This made it not possible to have the transition done last night, but fortunately, the buildd's reacted promptly and at this time, all the 11 builds have been completed successfully, with just a few remaining to be uploaded to incoming.

The catch: the upload was marked with low priority, so it would have taken 10 days to enter testing. The maintainer was then asked to reupload with a higher urgency, and that just happenned. Guys, this is bad. If you need to push some urgency so a package waits less to enter testing, don't do new uploads just for this. Instead, explain why you need the higher urgency to the release team (always reachable in debian-release@lists.debian.org or #debian-release in Freenode. They can bump these things internally in the testing scripts.

On a related note, if you maintain a package that directly or indirectly uses libcupsys, please, please don't do uploads until further notice, or you'll be blocking the transition further. Thanks.

Obviously Murphy is not on vacation yet... another day passes in the testing puzzle world.