Re: Bug#835533: dasher: Please package Dasher 5.0 beta

[Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org>]

Hello,

Michael Biebl, on Wed 05 Oct 2016 14:54:19 +0200, wrote:
> I'm not sure why you think there was fighing going on.
> Mario was/is part of the pkg-gnome team and had SVN commit rights for a
> very long time.
> 
> It's not like he couldn't have just uploaded the package instead. So I
> think it's a bit disingenious to say that he had no control over the
> package. Why he chose not to get involved is his decision ultimately.
> But implying that he was somehow hindered and there was fighting going
> on is misleading and unfair.
> 
> The pkg-gnome team actually tried in the past and still tries to get
> people involved who care about a11y and welcome any contributions in
> that regard.

Well,

Adrian Bunk, on Tue 04 Oct 2016 23:55:17 +0300, wrote:
> Andreas claiming "there's noone willing to commit to actually taking 
> care of the package" in the removal request is also quite at odds with
> him being completely silent on my suggestion to file a WNPP bug.

I do read the "work-needing" mails, so I would have seen it. There was
no single mail on the debian-accessibility list about dasher. I didn't
know it got removed from testing or even that help was requested. Had I
known it, I would have moved for sure, or at least post a request for
help on debian-accessibility.

So it's not active fighting indeed, but from the point of view of a11y
people it *is* definitely fighting to have to realize that something
again has fallen down, and have to spend energy into putting it up
again.

The case of a11y packages is very particular: their popularity is
irrelevant, since some people simply *need* them to be able to do any
kind of work with Debian. Just dropping the package from Debian, saying
that people who need it will install it by themselves, actually means
just killing the package: how will the user know about it? How will he
manage to install it not through the package manager while he is already
struggling with using the computer?

So if some of these packages is falling down, the debian-accessibility
team *has* to be notified so we can find a solution. Maybe we should
put in the ftp-master process that an RM request for any kind of
accessibility-related package shouldn't be processed without an ACK from
the debian-accessibility team?

Anyway, thanks a lot Thibaut for proposing to take maintenance of the
package. You're welcome in the debian-accessibility team ;)

Samuel