#1123680 git-debpush: support for DELAYED queue?

Package:
dgit
Source:
dgit
Submitter:
Simon Josefsson
Date:
2026-01-03 13:35:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1123680#5
Date:
2025-12-19 20:35:51 UTC
From:
To:
I can't find any occurance of the "delay" keyword in the git-debpush
manpage or on https://wiki.debian.org/tag2upload -- is uploading to the
DELAYED queue supported via tag2upload?  How do I do that?

This is a wishlist bug report for you to 1) please document current
status wrt support for DELAYED queue for git-debpush and tag2upload
(maybe on the wiki as a current limtation?), and 2) please support
delayed queue uploads in tag2upload, if that makes sense at all.

/Simon
#1123680#10
Date:
2025-12-20 11:39:52 UTC
From:
To:
Hello,

It's not supported.  I don't think it would be too difficult, because
dgit already supports it.  We would just have to plumb tag metadata
through.  If someone wanted to work on it might even be a good bug for a
new contributor to dgit/tag2upload.

I've added it to the wiki.  I don't think it belongs in git-debpush(1)
because there are a lot of other strange Debianisms that we could say we
don't support, and I'd rather not clutter things up.
#1123680#15
Date:
2026-01-03 12:42:08 UTC
From:
To:
Sean Whitton writes ("Bug#1123680: git-debpush: support for DELAYED queue?"):

I think this is much more complicated than it seems.

Firstly, I want to say that while DELAYED serves a vital purpose in
Debian's internal political economy, its actual design and protocol
structure is very strange and has many undesirable properties.  The
invisibility-to-others of a DELAYED upload is particularly poor.
There is much opportunity for people stepping on each others' feet.

In an ideal world, we would perhaps invent something a bit like
DELAYED but much more git-like.  IDK exactly what the shape would be.
It would be worth thinking about this before we implement something in
tag2upload.  Or to put it another way: we should decide what a
pure-git DELAYED NMU looks like, first.  I doubt it would involve the
legacy archive queue daemon DELAYED feature.

Secondly, there is a practical difficulty.  DELAYED is only sensible
for an NMU.  But we don't support NMUs properly because we don't have
anywhere to push the tag.

Ian.
#1123680#20
Date:
2026-01-03 13:33:28 UTC
From:
To:
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

I agree that this may be one of those things that are not worth
supporting because they are not the best workflows to start with.

So I would suggest delaying/deferring support for this for as long as
possible.

I believe DELAYED is sensible for other things than NMU's though.  My
use-case for the 'xe' DELAYED upload was the ITS/PackageSalvaging
process.  That entire process seems to also be a workaround for some
other deeper problem.

One solution to this could be declare the following as the tag2upload
DELAYED process:

   1) Do a normal pre-dgit upload to DELAYED following all normal
      process around that (using old 'debsign+dput' tooling), increasing
      the intended delay by one day, and then one day before the
      cut-off, do

   2) cancel the DELAYED upload and make a tag2upload upload.

This is technically not pretty, but I think it pretty much mirror the
social aspects of what DELAYED is intenteded to capture, which seems to
be what it is all about.

/Simon