Quiet upstreams
This was in -devel a couple days ago:
Craig Small wrote:
> ...
> I have a reasonably good working relationship with the upstream
> maintainer Patrick Powell and he does actively maintain LPRng. Actually
> he's probably my best upstream maintainer, even including packages where
> I am that upstream!
I got a chuckle out of this but it leads me to a question.
I've adopted a package from a fellow NM who will be offline for
an extended period. I'm having trouble getting a response from
upstream about a fairly minor problem. I almost decided to give
maintaining the package a pass because of this. I already have
a package where upstream isn't responsive and it's a pain in the
ass. But my sponsor says this isn't unusual so I've gone ahead
and he's uploaded it.
I read a post by Rob Browning before I did my first package about
respecting upstream,
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-devel-9907/msg00216.html
I've tried to follow the ideas in that post. But when upstream
isn't responsive and you have to do fixes yourself, maintain
local patches if they won't go upstream, or worst case maintain
the package yourself, it's a different ballgame.
Do maintainers generally pass on maintaining things when upstream
is shown to be inactive or unresponsive?
Rick
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