(Don't CC, I'm in -devel) On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 03:28:50AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote: > > > lmbench > > Ditto. > > # The current maintainer is looking for someone who can take over (...) > to be co-maintainer in order to help the actual maintainer. Please > see bug number #216883 for more information. > > Is that still true? Yes, it is. A RFA: is disctintly different from an O: however. > > Now, I really don't remember seeing a mail on d-announce saying that > > autobuilders would not build non-free packages, but maybe I've missed it. > > It was mentioned in Bug number #216883 of yours so you must have > forgotten about it since last October. But a number of DDs are > surprised to hear that so your not alone not knowing. Notice that I did not said I didn't know about this, I said I have not seen it mentioned "officially" (either in d-announce or in our documentation). > Some packages can't be autobuild for legal reasons. All of those are > in non-free. There is no flag in the source packages saying what can > be legally build and what not and no list is provided otherwise. Also > some people don't want to support non-free software. The funny thing is that most of the packages you mentioned from me (save for lmbench) have been autobuilt at some point and _no_one_ has ever asked me if there were legally reasons not to do this. I can understand that there might be _some_ packages that could not be autobuilt, but I fail to see why this would be applied to all packages, even those that have been already autobuild. Notice that the builds of my packages (and probably of many other DDs) have not been removed, so those "legal" reasons don't seem to be of much concern, but more of an excuse. > I think what would work best currently is if you get a comaintainer > for every arch you can't build the package on or at least a steady > group of sponsors. If noone is willing to build the package you can > file a bug against ftp.debian.org to get obsolete versions removed. No, I can still keep it the current way and only provide support for i386 users running unstable, which is really fine by me too, BTW. And if someone comes over and asks why is 'X' not available/updated in his favorite architecture 'Y' I will forward him to the mailing list for that arch. So, you see, there's really some in-betweens in this situation. The fact that those packages are non-free mean that they are low priority for me, I will probably not fix bugs in them if there are serious bugs in other packages I maintain or co-maintain. That is not to say that I won't do it, it's just that there are other 62 packages that are higher in the listk. Given infinite time, they will get their share too. Since probably many others maintainers have not rejected NMUs or help from interested parties I don't see how this situation is better than handing them over to our (overloaded?) QA group. Matter of fact, I would not like to see QA people dedicating time to non-free packages when there are still RC bugs open. Regards Javi
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