On Thu, Jan 01, 2004 at 04:15:49AM +0100, Frank Lichtenheld wrote: > a) making good software together ... pissing of people is seldom the > best way to do things From the packages I've seen which I'd class as badly maintained, the maintainers are not making software together. They are working on their own, not responding to other developers or bug reports. Our DPL has responded that he's orphaned packages of some maintainers, but they are still debian developers since they upload other packages occasionally. Some did not respond to him, yet they are still debian developers. IMH uninformed opinion, by not responding they are clearly not following the Debian social contract... at the moment nothing seems to be being done about this - the MIA checks we have read about in responses seem to be automated a little too much - we don't seem to be looking for maintainers who only make occasional uploads to fix rc issues, ignore (or just close) non-rc bugs and never interact with the rest of the Debian community. > 3) If you try to judge one thousand different people from > different countries, backgrounds, motivations with some simple > guidelines you will make faults. That's why we need a group of respected Debian developers looking at individual cases rather than 'simple guidelines'. Debian developers are nice people. You should not be worried about faults or people checking up on quality of your work - most of us will have packages in a bad state at some point. The task of a group looking for mia and incompetent maintainers would primarily be to offer support to maintainers who need it - get them to ask for co-maintainers if they are overloaded, etc. > b) Only a maintainer (or a group of maintainers) can maintain a I agree. If an NMU fixes an rc issue in a poorly maintained package, it could in make the issue that that package is poorly maintained less visible. .. This would lead me to suggest that perhaps mia checks should look at packages which get nmu's. Unfortunately that would make lots of maintainers think of nmus as very insulting and get aggressive whenever anyone nmus their packages. -- .''`. Mark Howard : :' : `. `' http://www.tildemh.com `- mh@debian.org | mh@tildemh.com | mh344@cam.ac.uk
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