Quality Charter for Debian Maintainers
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Hi everybody,
you can find on http://qa.debian.org/maintainer.html what I called
a "Quality Charter" for the maintainers. It is a short & concrete
list of what a *good* maintainer is expected to do. :-)
I think that it is mainly common sense but you can disagree. You
can even discuss about completing or modifying this text, it doesn't
matter because the goal of my mail is not discussing this text ... I
simply want to remind you (you the Debian maintainers) of your job and
responsibilities, if you can't assume your packages completely (and this
is perfectly comprehensible since many of us are very busy) then please
orphan the packages that you can't manage. Other developers with more time
will take them over, there is absolutely no point keeping your package if
you don't respond to bug reports and/or if you don't fix them.
So consider this mail as a « call to orphan packages ». If you
don't know how to orphan a package, read the web page mentionned
above.
If you have problem keeping up with one of your package but you don't want
to orphan it, then please consider asking help. Someone may help you to
maintain the package. How to ask for help is explained in the
web page mentionned above (even if this looks a bit silly, it's good
to be able to check in a single place what work can be done for Debian
and who needs help).
Consider this as the beginning of the work for Debian's quality. This is
very important since when people adopt packages, they tend to fix many
bugs (look at Ben's work with shadow !) that wouldn't have been fixed if
they couldn't adopt it.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog -=- http://tux.u-strasbg.fr/~raphael/
<pub> CDs Debian : http://tux.u-strasbg.fr/~raphael/debian/#cd </pub>
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