Keep in touch We don’t really have a lot of spare capacity to check up on things, so if we ask for more information or send you away to do an upload, please stay in touch about it. Do remove a moreinfo tag if you reply to a question and are now waiting for us again. Do…

Boy I love rumours. Recently I’ve heard two, which I ought to put to rest now everybody’s calmed down from recent events. kFreeBSD isn’t an official Jessie architecture because <insert systemd-related scare story> Not true. Our sprint at ARM (who kindly hosted and caffeinated us for four days) was timed to coincide with the Cambridge…

If it’s not in an unblock bug, we probably aren’t reading it We really, really prefer unblock bugs to anything else right now (at least, for things relating to Jessie). Mails on the list get lost, and IRC is dubious. This includes for pre-approvals. It’s perfectly fine to open an unblock bug and then find…

Don’t assume another package’s unblock is a precedent for yours Sometime we’ll use our judgement when granting an unblock to a less-than-straightforward package. Lots of factors go into that, including the regression risk, desirability, impact on other packages (of both acceptance and refusal) and trust. However, a judgement call on one package doesn’t automatically mean…

Make sure bug metadata is accurate We use the metadata on the bugs you claim to have closed, as well as reading the bug report itself. You can help us out with severities, tags (e.g. blocks), and version information. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that an unblock is a green light into Jessie….

Make sure everything you’ve changed is in the changelog We do read the diffs in detail, and if there’s no explanation for something that’s changed we’ll ask. We also expect it to be in the changelog. Do save some round-trips by making sure your changelog is in order. One round-trip about your package is an…

If your request doesn’t appear on the list, probably the diff was too big There’s a size limit for mails to debian-release@lists.debian.org, and in general that’s how we read unblock requests. If your mail doesn’t appear on the list, but you do get a bug number back, your mail is likely too large.. In this…

Make it easy for us to review your request The release team gets a lot of mail at this time in the cycle. Make it easy for us by: including as much information as you can think of yes, even if you think it’s too much remember we have probably never seen your package before…

It’s finally become properly autumnal, in the real world and in Debian. One week ago, I announced (on behalf of the whole release team) that Debian 8 “Jessie” had successfully frozen on time. At 18:00 that evening we had 310 release critical bugs – that is, the number that we must reduce to 0 before…