On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 09:58:07AM -0800, Craig Dickson wrote: > Martin Loschwitz wrote: >> In my opinion, with this step, mICQ has proven as dishonorable to >> be distributed with Debian anymore > If you don't want to handle it anymore, a request for adoption might > be more suitable. It sounds as though upstream's problem is with you > personally, not Debian as a whole, so he might stop putting in > little easter eggs like this if the package is maintained by someone > he is happier to work with. I think Debian should somewhat stick together. We certainly shouldn't encourage upstream developers to annoy our users because of issues they have with the maintainer. On the other hand, forcing a package maintainer upon upstream is counter-productive. And "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software". It hurts our users to have a sucky Gnomovision because the upstream Gnomovision developer can't stand the maintainer. This brings me to a more general issue: We need a procedure to "disown" maintainers. I mean, if they prove they suck at maintaining some package, some procedure to assign the package to someone else. The initial request could come from upstream, pissed off users, something like that (a "plaintiff"). Some procedure (a "trial") would then decide whether removing maintainership of that package from the maintainer would be just, fair and the better thing for Debian, its users, free software. We need a carefully crafted policy to guide the trial, to write down how these goals should be balanced. -- Lionel Elie Mamane
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