Team maintenance of more Apache modules?

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

I've been NMUing a lot of Apache modules recently to try to get them
into shape for Apache 2.4.  I suppose it's inevitable that NMUing
stragglers for a transition means you get to see the least
well-maintained packages, but I've seen quite a few cases that look
roughly like this:

 * single maintainer, last upload several years ago
 * irregular handling of whether to load the module by default
 * haphazard cut-and-paste maintainer scripts with a variety of
   behaviour, sometimes even mentioning the wrong module name
   (dh-apache2 is helping a lot here)
 * non-standard file names in /etc/apache2/mods-available/, which are
   cumbersome to sort out after the fact (since you also have to take
   care to update the mods-enabled symlinks and a2enmod/a2dismod's
   internal state)
 * often still vestiges of Apache 1 packaging kicking around
 * a variety of other features which are widely regarded as stale, such
   as dpatch

To me, this suggests that many of these packages would benefit from team
maintenance.  Of course some of libapache2-mod-* are already
team-maintained because they're built from source packages that do other
things - notably the various language maintenance teams for things like
libapache2-mod-perl2 - but there are plenty of source packages that only
build an Apache module.  The contrast with the Haskell team which I
joined recently (almost all team-maintained, very high degree of
packaging consistency, lots of tools, amazingly low bug-to-package
ratio) has been pretty striking to me, and it suggests possible
improvement.  I don't mean to diss the maintainers involved; it's just
that there are obvious economies of scale here.  The Apache 2.4 porting
work has been pretty formulaic for the most part, and no doubt there'll
be an Apache 2.6 in the future and we'll get to do it all over again.

This isn't my normal field (although I did web server development in a
previous job), and while I'd like to help out I certainly can't set up a
team entirely on my own.  Would module maintainers be interested in this
kind of thing?  Depending on what the Apache server maintainers are
amenable to in terms of access control and bug mail on
debian-apache@lists, we could either use the existing pkg-apache Alioth
project or start a new pkg-apache-modules project.  We could start with
libapache2-mod-auth-plain, which is currently orphaned, but it'd be nice
to have a few more.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]