Re: Does a DD become solely responsible for abandonware in Debian?
On Wed, 18 Oct 2006 13:50:05 -0500, "Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso" <jordigh@gmail.com> wrote:
> My questions are these: is this a good idea? Is it a good idea to try
> to Debianise a package with no real upstream authors? If I did that,
> would I or my sponsor become responsible for maintenance?
If there is no viable upstream then you really owe it to users of the package to find one. Either yourself or someone else. Consider what happens if there is a security bug in the package and you don't know how to code...
I'm lucky (or not depending on your point of view) that I can write code and so have become upstream for a few of my packages; just became upstream for yet another 2 days ago. The problem is without a proper upstream, some tricky bugs cannot get fixed. Try to get help; I'm now getting useful help from some other distros. As a side-line you get to see how well (or not) they handle bugs!
That doesn't mean you should not release it at all, but if I could not understand the code I would try to find people in the near term. Look around, for specific programs like yours you will find someone out there to help.
Slightly off-topic, in case anyone is wondering, LPRng forked this week because the upstream was unresponsive (ie he doesn't even reply back to emails, the mail list is dead etc). It's not ideal, but it is better than what we had. For those who can write C and use LPRng (and understand its code) and want to help out, drop me a line.
- Craig
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