Intent to hijack gnuchess
Hereby I state my intent to hijack the gnuchess package. I am
co-maintaining gnuchess upstream and I think Debian deserves a better
maintained package. Martin seems not to be dead or anything, he even
uploaded one of his packages in September (eject), but he has not
been responding to my mails and bug reports since about 5 months.
Some history: In [1] I stated my intent to change the packaging of
gnuchess after unsuccessful attempts to contact the maintainer. Before
that Andreas Tille had NMUd gnuchess to upload the new upstream
version which fixed most of the annoying bugs. However, having wasted
a long time trying to contact the maintainer, gnuchess did not make it
into woody. I had prepared packages for gnuchess and gnuchess-book and
I already had a sponsor (Thimo Neubauer) who announced the intent to
hijack gnuchess on debian-devel [2]. However, while still resolving
some copyright/license issues around gnuchess-book [3], suddenly
Martin uploaded a new package of gnuchess, reverting some changes of
Andreas Tille (like the very basic manpage). Asked why he did not
answer any emails before that, he just said that he was very busy and
would eventually read all emails. He also wrote to me
Thank you for your work on gnuchess. I will look over your patches
with interest next time I update gnuchess. If you ever do become a
Debian developer, then I would consider handing the package over to
you.
However, as of yet he did not comment of my proposal to package
gnuchess-book (I ITPd and uploaded it myself now), he did not fix or
even comment on long-outstanding bugs, some of them with patches (I
just NMUd gnuchess to fix the most annoying ones) and he did not
respond to my email asking to maintain gnuchess when I was finally
accepted as a Debian developer. I do not want to wait till hell
freezes over, so I would like to take over gnuchess. Now please go
ahead and flame me. :)
Lukas
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200204/msg00916.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200204/msg01544.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/debian-legal-200204/msg00043.html
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