Managing your PTS subscriptions

Subscribing to packages on the PTS is really useful to stay informed of everything happening with those packages. Unfortunately, managing your PTS subscriptions is really a challenge. Here is how I proceed to subscribe to packages I forgot to subscribe after uploading them:

  • To get the list of your subscriptions, connect to master.d.o, and run
    /org/packages.qa.debian.org/bin/get-summary-subscribers.pl | grep your@email
    That’s also a way to know who is interested in your packages. :-)
  • You can use UDD (from master) to know the list of packages you should probably be subscribed to, that is, packages you maintain or co-maintain in sid:
    psql -A -t service=udd -c "select source from sources
    where distribution='debian' and release='sid'
    and maintainer_email='your@email'
    union select source from uploaders
    where distribution='debian' and release='sid'
    and email='your@email';"
  • You can them use combine to find the packages you should subscribe to, and mass-subscribe using the email interface.
  • Then, you are done, or almost done: mass-confirming PTS subscriptions is a PITA because of #340863.

Some more info:

  • The PTS lives on master, in /org/packages.qa.debian.org.
  • The script that handles emails send to pts@ is bin/control.pl.
  • The spool dir for pending requests is spool/. The files are simple text files.
  • You can send multiple commands per email. Sending them in the subject might be broken. (at least it failed for me)
  • You don't need to take special care of the From for your emails. It's ignored (unless you subscribe without specifying an email address).