overridable rejects would be nice

[Colin Watson]

Occasionally, somebody uploads a source that takes a long time to build, and then gets rejected at the binary upload stage for a correct but unimportant reason (example: an openoffice.org upload in edgy that got binary-rejected for a missing Pre-Depends on a version of dpkg that was in hoary). It would be nice for a distro manager to be able to selectively override such rejections.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

or even better, remove the check completely. the needed dpkg version is in all supported releases.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

It should not be removed, and bearing in mind that we need to support LTS->LTS upgrades we should get into the habit of precisely specifying dependencies to save ourselves trouble later; but since as you say it's not very important in this particular case it could perhaps be downgraded to a warning, provided that there were some way that we could get hold of a list of all such warnings that had been emitted for currently-published binaries.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

My suggestion is that rather than rejecting these packages, they be held in a queue where they can be acted upon by the archive administrators. It should be possible to see the reason why they were held, so that the admin can make a decision about what to do. The uploader should receive a notification with the reason, and they will typically upload a new version correcting the problem and superseding the held version.

However, the admin should be able to explicitly accept them for extenuating circumstances.