There's a confluence of circumstances that occurs regularly now that is wasting lots of time for those trying to squash bugs: 1) It's really hard to get signoffs for core packages. It usually takes at least a week, and an extra bump, and coaxing. The process isn't fire-and-forget, so I have to spend time each day thinking about packages I currently have awaiting signoffs and what has happened to them and whether or not I need to take some action. 2) Signoff threads are hijacked for a general discussion about the package. This is annoying because it happens AFTER the developer has done all the work teeing up the new package, testing it himself on both environments, writing up the signoff, doing the coaxing, watching the signoff thread. Once the thread is hijacked, it becomes even more difficult for those who would sign off to figure out the state of the signoff. All this has the effect of filibustering progress in core and discouraging people from doing work on core packages. There are a number of potential solutions to this problem-- perhaps some of you will think of others. Here are two that come to mind: 1) Get a web signoff mechanism to really work for us. We'd have to evaluate why the previous web mechanism wasn't embraced and solve the problems with it. This would require some more work in archweb, which I could probably do if we thought it was the right approach. 2) A pre-signoff thread for each signoff. You run this thread before you do any packaging work, so that if someone wants to discuss other things about the package and suggest other modifications, they do it without causing you a whole lot of extra work. We then agree not to hijack signoff threads for unrelated aspects of the package-- rather, we start other threads or open new bug reports. What do others think? Any other ideas for how to handle this? - P