Now that maintain several dozens of packages in Debian, I think twice before uploading a new one. Does it have a future, a public ? Some of the packages I prepare are available on git.debian.org, and are listed in Debian Med's tasks pages. It would not take me long to finish most of them, but that does not take into account the time others will spend on it. They will make our archive bigger and our quality tests longer to execute. Somebody will translate their description. Somebody else will perhaps write a security patch someday, or a patch to make the package compilable with a new version of GCC. All in all, each package has a footprint in Debian's ecosystem.

That footprint starts early, as soon as the package is sent to the NEW queue. For instance, I kept by mistake some old content in the copyright file of clustalw, that was recently freed and has to go through the NEW queue to be transferred from the non-free to the main area of our archive. That costed a small of exchange of emails, that could have been avoided. Our packages should be perfect, but that is difficult to achieve alone. For that reason, I proposed two years ago a package review system, that functions like a chain reaction.

The principle is simple. After uploading to the NEW queue, download two neighbor packages and check their copyright file. The errors found can be corrected by their maintainer before the the FTP team inspects it, which save their time. For instance, after uploading tabix, I found an error in mediathekview, that was corrected. That compensates for my mistake with clustalw. If each person receiving a package review does a review of two other packages, that will create a chain reaction that will clean the queue from the simplest mistakes, leaving only the really problematic cases. As Torsten noted recently, the NEW queue is getting long. So how about trying to help ?