Re: Status of the shadow package
Christian Perrier <bubulle@debian.org> writes:
> Hello Karl and Sam,
>
> During Debconf4, there has been some discussions within the d-i team
> and some maintainers of Custom Debian Distributions (mostly
> Skolelinux) about the status of the Debian package for shadow.
>
> As you have obviously noticed, I have NMU'ed the package four times
> last month, mostly for l10n considerations. The installer team has built
> a strong team of translators which have all made a huge work
> for bringing a lot of translations to core d-i and the related
> packages, including shadow.
And I thank you, it's been a mess. [Actually, this has been causing me to
conclude that we probably need a mechanism whereby translators can cause
new translations to appear outside of the structure of the "package" itself.
> This is basically why I did these NMUs. I also fixed one or two
> usability bugs in passwd.config but tried to be very conservative
> there...(not enough, indeed, as I managed to break it once)
>
> The discussions we had lead to the conclusion that closer attention
> needs to be done with this package. We're currently considering
> building a project on alioth for the package maintenance so that more
> people may help maintaining it....which of course includes you both.
It's been difficult scare up the moral necesary to give it that much
attention recently given that I don't believe Debian is ever going to
successfully release a new stable.
> This is not a takeover....or at least not yet (well, if we do not get
> any answer, you may imagine some takeover will happen)....but a
> proposal for a wider collaborative maintenance which should probably
> benefit all of us.
Well, no, if you tell a package maintainer that it "has been decided" that
you're going to use infrastructure that the maintainer refuses to rely on,
that is most certainly a takeover.
> Indeed, several people over there in Brazil told me "just take over
> this package, Christian". I don't want to, for two reasons:
Nice of them to share their opinion with me.
> -my shoulders are a bit not wide enough and I can't add all this
> weight on them...:-)
>
> -I certainly don't want to be rude in any matter towards you and a
> simple takeover *would* be rude
Thank you.
> What is your feeling about this? If you run short of time, please just
> drop a very short word so that we can have an idea of where we
> currently are going....
I very much would have liked to be part of the initial discussion, but I
couldn't afford to make it to debconf4.
Really, I think the right approach is to "throw away" the shadow codebase
and replace it with something that isn't such a tangles mess of #ifdefs.
Thorsten Kukuk at/with/and/? Suse seems to have made a good start at fixing the
infrastructure for this stuff; see
http://www.thkukuk.de/pam/
kcr
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