Early this month, the first batch of packages were automatically removed from testing due to RC bugs. Personally, I find that the results stand out pretty well on the RC bug graph[1]. There has been a very rapid decline in the number of RC bugs affecting testing – a week or two ago, we had over 1000 RC bugs affecting testing and now it has dropped to something like 760.
There has also been quite a few RC bug fixes in this time period. I spent a bit of time finding and aging some of the RC bug fixes in sid, so they would migrate to testing faster[2]. On the first batch, we saw something like 40 RC bugs disappear and we still have more RC bugs fixes in the sid->testing pipeline.
While looking for packages I could age, I also noticed that we have quite a few RC bug fixes blocked by “out of date” binaries (which is usually either build issues or uncoordinated transitions). I have been filing a couple of RC bugs for these, but it does not scale do this kind of work manually. If you have uploaded a package recently, please take the 5 minutes to check that it actually built and it has no “out of date” binaries issues in its excuses.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/
[2] The aging was equivalent to an urgency=medium, so reduced the requirement from 10 days to 5 days.
