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Re: MIA, Incompetent and holiday-loving maintainers (was: Request for NMUs.)

Mark Howard wrote:

Could somebody please explain what is being done about this? Is anybody
looking at lists such as this (and bug lists in general) to see if any
of the maintainers are truly mia;
I have been. However, it doesn't seem to do any good. Martin Mitchell is obviously MIA, but nobody's bothered to orphan his packages yet. 


or even looking for maintainers who
are clearly overloaded and suggesting they ask for more help, or perhaps
saving them the hassle and asking for them - send a list of their
packages to -devel asking for co-maintainers.


<snip>

There is also the question of maintainers who are not MIA, but are doing
a bad job maintaining one of their many packages but won't let go or ask
for help - there seems to be no advice about what to do about this. Any
attempts I've seen always just lead to flame wars and loss of
productivity even more.
Yep; this looks like a major problem. I've encountered a lot of packages whose "maintainers" seem to think that letting the RC bugs pile up for 6-8 months on each package is perfectly reasonable. :-/ 


Individual developers do not want to be branded as trouble makers by
looking into these things off their own backs.
That's kind of why I was doing this, because I'm not a Debian Developer, so I *can't* really be blacklisted. ;-) (Or if I was, well, it would have to be a very extreme form of blacklisting.) 


We fear being added to
blacklists and so not having our NEW packages dealt with, etc (see many
recent threads on -devel). If the people sending "are you mia?"
messages and doing the checks are appointed people, they are less likely
to be branded so and are also more likely to be able to find the best
way of doing this - having a well-worded template to send out perhaps.
Yep. Appointed people would be much better. I can find this stuff out, but as a non-DD, I can't *do* anything about it.
I would suggest that the DPL delegate people to do this. But the current DPL shows no inclination to make any delegations, or indeed use his DPL capacity for any functional purpose. *boo hiss*. Folks, elect a real DPL next time, OK?
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