Please write about your intentions before doing changes

Wed Mar 9 12:29:56 UTC 2016

Hi Gianfranco,

I find it a bit rude that you keep changing things, commiting and
uploading, before asking or declaring your intentions, and then asking
"is everything OK" and asking for permission to e.g. reupload to
DELAYED/0 only later; even when you know that other people are
actively keeping an eye on things.

This behaviur is "pushy", and forces the person who might want to say
"no" to enter in a conflict between pointing out errors or not go
ahead so quickly and being rude.
If you know that you want to do those changes, why not declare your
intentions first, when you know that other people are actively working
on it?

So sorry if this or the following comes across as a bit rude, but I
don't have any other alternative by now, other than remain silent.

Secondly, you clobbered the tag of libsdl1.2 and a version which is
already uploaded to unstable:

==================================
This is an automated email from the git hooks/post-receive script.

locutusofborg pushed a change to annotated tag debian/1.2.15+dfsg1-2
in repository libsdl1.2.

*** WARNING: tag debian/1.2.15+dfsg1-2 was modified! ***

      from  208a19d   (tag)
        to  a3b7bb2   (tag)
   tagging  f914e71823df1063b34bd574d4f02bb7bcd60205 (commit)
  replaces  debian/1.2.15+dfsg1-1
 tagged by  Gianfranco Costamagna
        on  Wed Mar 9 12:10:16 2016 +0100
==================================

Thirdly, as I already told you in a private e-mail a few days ago when
you asked (so you were fully aware of it), I wanted to wait a bit for
the SDL_qsort stuff to use the opportunity to try to get SDL people to
do an upstream release, or perhaps the alternative to pack whatever is
in current VCS, since we have to have a new "orig" tarball anyway.

Just two months ago they declared their intentions to not repeat the
situation as between 2.0.3 and 2.0.4 of spending more than 2 years
without a release; but since 2.0.4 they already started to push
full-steam-ahead and there are more than a hundred changes in a short
period of 2 months and they don't want to do a minor release, I am
quite sure that we're going to see the same situation again of many
months or years without a bugfix release.  This is a situation that
it's not ideal to us at all.

Apart from that, it was me who communicated back and forth and helped
to drive the situation with the license to a happy end by notifying
the different parties (after Ben's offer).  Getting this resolved at
the source is more important than doing things only on the Debian
side.

So the legal situation is clear and solving it in this way was hugely
benefitial; but uploading a fix for this was not urgent, and possibly
not even legally necessary, and fixing other cosmetic-only issues like
the VCS thing as you did was not urgen either (that maybe will be
fixed in another way by using relative URLs, according to the
discussion in -devel that died a bit, but might be revived).  Doing
gratiutous uploads is not free for the Debian infrastructure nor for
thousands of people who have to download files for a cosmetic issue
that they don't even see in the binary package and that are of no
importance whatsoever, once the author relicensed the code.

Fourthly, I was also "on top" of the situation of libsdl1.2, in fact I
was the only one replying to the bug report in more than a week,
before you posted announcing the upload after the fact.  If this was
part of a transition, fact that I didn't know and it wasn't even
announced in debian-release, you (or the original submitter, or
somebody else) could have let me know and I could have decided to go
ahead with this.  Or we can wait until it's really needed, and maybe
changes for more transitions are made effective in a single upload
(libsdl1.2 will be affected by many transitions between now and the
release, I suspect).

So, all in all, at least I don't find very comfortable when you do
these things.  If you really want to help, please announce your
intentions at least before you upload, or even commit things to VCS.
I have the bad habit of not doing this sometimes, but that's because
I'm almost the only one that was doing changes and uploading things to
the SDL packages for years, so sometimes I forget that other people
might be working on things, but this is not the case.

So could you please cancel the uploads, revert the +pending in the BTS, etc?

Thanks.
-- 
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo at gmail.com>