Ralf Nolden <nolden@kde.org> writes: > Before I started to get involved in that, the Qt packages were a complete mess > from the technical point of view, much more from the programmers point of > view. As Martin Loschwitz aka Madkiss is the current maintainer of the > package, I tried to work with him to resolve the issues that I saw from the > programming and users's point of view so the Qt packages would become > perfect. > > FYI, KDE's CVS has a module qt-copy. This one holds the debian dir for > packaging, which led to the misconclusion that one just needs to package > qt-copy and be done with Qt. Martin has a CVS account at KDE (so do I, > obviously), just that he claimed the exclusive right to commit there or yell > at anyone doing changes without his consent. While I considered this to be > quite childish, I gave my best on my patience to work with him even though I > could have done all changes there myself. > > Now, quite a lot of stuff has been done since Martin didn't want to listen but > gave it a second thought every other day. The result was that I had to > explain things over and over again for every single file to be packaged > where. With this week, there are still issues in Qt that IMHO need to be > resolved to make it work for everyone, but apparently Martin put me on ignore > on IRC, so I only have the option to package up my own Qt packages and work > inside qt-copy/debian myself. Before doing so and giving up any hope that I > can't educate a 16 year old non-programmer to work with a programmer, I can > only turn to debian-devel to ask around if anyone can teach a new maintainer > to listen what seems to be optimal to make his package perfect. FWIW, I've also found Martin to be extremely stubborn, childish, and difficult to work with. He's not unique in that sense, as I'm sure everyone has had conflicts with at least a few other maintainers in the past. Typically, these conflicts aren't a significant problem since, in general, the maintainer does an adequate job with package despite the disagreements. However, it's a much bigger problem in this case because, as Ralf mentioned, Martin is not a programmer and does not program with Qt at all. He has a very strong tendency to produce broken packages because he doesn't even use nor test the packages he produces, and is very difficult to persuade to fix them. I don't think Qt is a package that is best-maintained by a sole person, and especially by someone that is very protective of the package. I'd be much happier to see someone else take over the package, be it myself, Ralf, Ivan, someone else, or preferably a combination of maintainers. -- My secret to happiness... is that I have a heart of a 12-year-old boy. It's over here in a jar. Would you like to see it?
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