Distribution quotes of the week

The source package is the interface for your team to collaborate with the rest of Debian. I think there is value in providing this information in a way that everyone knows how to consume.

For the things it can't detect - either because they require looking at multiple packages, or because the check would have too many false positives to be useful, or because they're so subjective that you can't write a check - it's no substitute for a maintainer paying attention. If you want to write a lintian check for one of the less rigorous parts of Policy, like "The extended description should describe what the package does and how it relates to the rest of the system", I wish you luck in your artificial intelligence research :-)

But I'm not sure Debian today even wants to be that sort of shining beacon of how to do things right, so much as just wanting to keep putting out a decent free distribution with minimal hassle. If you just want the latter, then it's certainly easiest to just not publish archives of -private, but leave it open for whatever. There's no need for a GR to achieve that, it's what we've already been doing.

On the other hand, we have this conversation every (or every other) mid release cycle... so maybe we should just do the play one more time. Some drama about how Gnome sucks, gets special treatment, or isn't as special as systemd, is always put upon.. then a dramatic quitting around beta and general agreement that we will all do better for the next release. It's just like Shakespeare without iambic pentameter.