Re: Proposal for removal of mICQ package
On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 11:27:04PM -0800, Craig Dickson wrote:
> Even to call it an "exploit" of the Debian
> development process is silly, since it's surely quite normal for new
> versions of programs to have behaviors (intentional or otherwise) that
> the package maintainer doesn't know about.
Isn't it still an exploit of the development process? Rüdiger
effectively showed that an upstream author can sneak code past the
debian maintainer, and if I judge the situation correctly, there was
enough friction between Madkiss and Rüdiger, so Madkiss should have been
careful of what he uploads to sid.
But I don't think we should penalize one of them for these actions, or
even the users of mICQ (by removing it from the archive).
Rüdiger has made his point, without doing much harm (users who noticed
that mICQ didn't run any more got a clear explanation where to get a
working version). Of cours he did it in a very controversial way, but on
the other hand, I think it was a nice hack and I had quite some fun
reading about this situation :)
Madkiss didn't notice this hack, and probably was the reason why Rüdiger
took such measures, but he didn't work less careful than most mantainers
do from time to time. So this lesson should teach us all to take some
more care reading the patches between packages we upload. (It has the
nice side-effect that it's often possible to find upstream bugs!)
Now, to find a way out of this situation: I think Madkiss is not too
interested in maintaining this package any more, otherwise he wouldn't
have propose it's removal. Martin, am I right? If so, is there someone
else who wants to take that package? Perhaps a different developer can
work with Rüdiger to solve the packaging issues, and build up a working
cooperation with Rüdiger so such issues won't happen again. I think
Rüdiger is trying to become a debian developer himself, so perhaps we
only need a sponsor, and Rüdiger can do the packaging?
And, people, take it with humor that Rüdiger managed to hide code and
put it into debian. It was _not_ a personal offence against us! No need
to pay something back.
Jan
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