Bugs for packages which don't exist anymore / missing maintainer
Hello,
I don't know if there's a more appropriate place to ask for this, if
so please tell me.
While looking for a bug report that I knew that existed but that I
couln't find, I noticed that the bug was assigned to
libwhatever-SOVERSION_OLD, and that the current package in the archive
contains libwhatever-SOVERSION_NEW, so the bug report was kind of
orphaned, in a limbo, and there's no maintainer assinged.
Complete listing of bug reports with missing maintainer (it takes a
few minutes to load, so **please don't "slashdot" the server by
mindless clicking**):
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?maint=
Then I was searching and found more cases like this one, for example
for these packages (emacs21 and python2.4) which doen't exist anymore
(except in oldstable and some ports [1] [2]):
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?package=emacs21
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=python2.4
Near the top of the page says: "There is no maintainer for emacs21.
This means that this package no longer exists (or never existed).
Please do not report new bugs against this package."
So I have several related questions:
1) In general, what should the maintainers do to prevent such cases?
I guess that one could reassign the bugs from the old package to the
new one, but it seems obvious that this can be oversought easily,
especially for libpackages where SOVERSION changes often. Is there
any automatic mechanism in place to try to prevent this?
2) What to do now with all of these bug reports? Reassign them to the
related source package in unstable? Contact QA? Nothing at all?
Cheers.
[1] http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=emacs21
[2] http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=python2.4
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