Re: Water and Fire (was: MIA, Incompetent and holiday-loving maintainers)
* Mark Howard <mh@debian.org> [2004-01-02 16:37]:
> Our DPL has responded that he's orphaned packages of some maintainers,
No, I did that with my QA hat on, not with my DPL hat. I use
leader@d.o for DPL related things, and my other address for the rest
to make this distinction clear.
> but they are still debian developers since they upload other
> packages occasionally.
The last mail contained one specific example. However, the majority
of people are not like this at all. In the majority of cases, I
orphan all packages and the maintainer never reacts (or, in some
cases, gives me permission to orphan all packages because they see
they are too busy or have lost interest).
Since the MIA database is currently on a restricted machine, I have
put the output of "mia-history" in gluck:~tbm/mia-history.txt. This
will give you a general impression of what was done and why people
were contacted.
> Some did not respond to him, yet they are still debian developers.
Not necessarily. The DAM made a "MIA check" [1] a while ago (pinged
developers without packages in the archive) and then retired accounts.
What I do and this plays together very well -- I orphan packages, and
then the DAM looks for developers who have not had any packages for a
while and finds those whose packages were previously orphaned. (Have
you read gluck:~tbm/mia.pdf? This is described there.)
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/debian-devel-announce-200305/msg00006.html
> 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.
Sure, that's all things I've done. I contact people who have
longstanding RC bugs, packages with old Standards-Version, (in the
past) packages which hadn't made the FHS transition yet, etc.
--
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com
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