Searching for how to remove files from delayed queue, I went to dcut manual page,
and did /delay, which led me to the description for rm

"[...] but you can also specify --nosearchdirs and then target individual UploadQueue directories, i.e. either filenames without path for regular in‐
 coming or DELAYED/DAYS-day/filename.  Wildcards are accepted."

Now, I tried this and went away to come back 6 hours later to notice that it
did not work, and only after some more searching found the cancel command
(despite it being listed right below reschedule right below this).

So I'd argue this needs some rewording to point the user a bit further down
if they want to delete deferred uploads (the distinction between delayed and deferred
is not particularly clear either, deferred is the delayed target basically).

howdy Julian,

The underlying problem here, IMO, is that the upload queue commands API is
just not well documented at all.

The ‘dcut(1)’ manual page is not the place to document that system;
documenting it in this package runs the significant risk of divergence from
the authoritative documentation that should reside in a location published
by the FTP team.

That should be done in the authoritative location for the FTP team, ideally
<URL: https://ftp-master.debian.org/>. I think that improvement should be
requested in a bug report to the ‘ftp.debian.org’ pseudo-package.

With that said, yes we can do more to avoid the problem you encountered.

The manual page ‘dcut(1)’ currently has a reference to the “Queue.README”
document online (very difficult to discover, and should be better
published; perhaps another bug report to ‘ftp.debian.org’ needed), citing
that as the authoritative source for upload queue commands.

I will resolve this bug report with two changes:

* Make that reference to “Queue.README” more prominent.

* Expand on the importance of it for understanding the queues
  and the queue commands.

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
dput, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 960556@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org> (supplier of updated dput package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:14:25 +1100
Source: dput
Architecture: source
Version: 1.2.7
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org>
Changed-By: Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org>
Closes: 960556 1151721
Changes:
 dput (1.2.7) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * The “Avi Wigderton” release.
   * pyproject.toml:
     * Work around Setuptools bug, to actually exclude files that already should
       be excluded from the package install.
       Closes: bug#1151721. Thanks to Santiago Vila for the report.
   * MANIFEST.in:
     * Specify required source files to include in SDist.
   * debian/rules:
     * Configure PyBuild to run the custom test suite.
     * Remove special override for ‘dh_installman’.
   * dcut.1:
     * Make the citation to ‘Queue.README’ document more prominent and detailed.
       Closes: bug#960556. Thanks to Julian Andres Klode for the report.
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