Qmail blocked once again - this time by the FTP masters

[Delian Krustev <krustev@krustev.net>]

  Hi,

I might think the following might be of interest for both Debian Project News 
and the Debian Leader.


Historically Qmail[1] had a licence which blocked its inclusion in Debian 
main. In 2007, its author - Daniel J. Bernstein[2] (aka DJB), decided to 
unleash the source code by declaring it in the "public domain".

Shortly after the licence change, Gerrit Pape[3], a debian developer[4] and 
long time DJB package maintainer opened an ITP[5] for Qmail. He also settled 
with the current maintainer of the qmail-src[6] package to be the new 
maintainer of Qmail in Debian.

Gerrit seemed to be ready with his work and has uploaded Qmail in the new 
queue around April 28th, 2008. Unfortunately his packages are stuck there and 
the FTP masters seem to be unresponsive ( See the last posts in [5] ).

More information on this issue could be found on Gerrit's page "Debian 
Packages - sid/lenny"[7] .

  [1] http://cr.yp.to/qmail.html
  [2] http://cr.yp.to/
  [3] http://www.smarden.org/pape/
  [4] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pape%40smarden.org
  [5] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=457318
  [6] http://packages.debian.org/sid/non-free/qmail-src
  [7] http://smarden.org/pape/Debian/sid.html

P.S. As a long time Debian user I could say that Gerrit does excellent work on 
his packages. He maintains important pieces of software for Debian - e.g. git 
and dash.


Cheers
--
Delian