[R-pkg-team] Bug#1039510: mvtnorm breaks r-cran-pammtools autopkgtest: missing Breaks and/or versioned (test) Depends?

[Nilesh Patra]

Dirk, Andreas,

On Wed, Jun 28, 2023 at 10:49:24AM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Yes, so I keep on updating r-cran- packages after freeze and save my
> time to repeat myself.

I probably should not be the one to add fuel to the fire, but allow me
to present some statistics.
The debian R team team currently has 1151 packages, and at the time of
writing this mail, there are only 2-3 volunteers who do the job of
maintaining this chunk of work, which means each volunteer is
maintaining at least ~384 packages just in the R team (and I'm speaking
this in the context of team uploads, and not according to the name
mentioned in uploaders field). Here's upload stats[2].

In addition to that, the said volunteers are also maintaining packages
in other debian teams. For instance, my packages span across ~10-12
different teams, and same goes for Andreas. On top of that, there's also
RFP requests from people and we have to constantly work on packaging new
and relevant software for debian.

@Dirk, you, on the other hand have most of the packages you maintain out
of maintainer teams, and as far as I can see, you currently have 179
packages[3], and you mostly upload only those packages, so it is likely easier
to bring them to cran latest at most times. I'm not trying to
draw any comparison, but only stating facts.

As you may see, the load that's on each volunteer is quite a lot, and it
gets humanely impossible to keep all those number of packages into an
updated state. We'd love to be at versions that CRAN (or bioconductor)
is at currently, but there simply aren't enough cycles most of the
times.

I'd also like to point out that despite the constraints,
during the past year, the number of stale packages were
consistently less than '30' which is ~CRAN latest.

Now is an anomally because freeze just ended, and there's a huge delta.

[1]: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?email=r-pkg-team%40alioth-lists.debian.net
[2]: http://blends.debian.net/liststats/uploaders_r-pkg.png
[3]: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=edd&comaint=yes

Best,
Nilesh
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