Re: Regarding unresponsive Debian maintainers (was: Re: Open-Source environments for Java)
On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 12:55:30AM -0300, Rog?rio Brito wrote:
> On May 22 2005, Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
> > Rog?rio Brito wrote:
> > > In my very humble and uninformed opinion, some maintainers should
> > > really give up maintaining their packages or should try to get other
> > > people as co-maintainers, if they lack the time to fix their
> > > packages. :-(
> > >
> > > If they applied to the project, then, they committed themselves to some
> > > responsibilities and even though the project is mostly driven by
> > > volunteers, if they can't keep up with their committments, then they
> > > should politely be asked to give space to other people. And I can tell
> > > you that there are other people interested in *working* for the
> > > project.
> >
> > By my count, there are already many maintainers that have done so with
> > their packages:
> >
> > http://www.nl.debian.org/devel/wnpp/rfa_bypackage
> > http://www.nl.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphaned
> > http://www.nl.debian.org/devel/wnpp/being_adopted
> >
> > I understand that not all are represented however.
>
> *That* was my point. The fact that a given package is being orphaned or
> adopted actually seems to indicate that some attention is being given to
> it: the maintainer recognizes that he has no time or interest in the
> package anymore and won't be stalling the project (or, at least, the users
> of such packages).
There is the MIA effort, led by myself, that does periodically look for
activity for all maintainers and inquire if activity is lacking.
However, this takes a bit of time, and also, it does benefit to have
tips about specific maintainers, because it is impossible to simply look
at all maintainers, one needs to rely on some heuristic to try to detect
inactive maintainers.
The past half year or so there hasn't been much MIA activity from
myself, mainly because as Andrew Suffield mentions, this is not the time
for big changes, but more importantly, the release process at the moment
can beter benefit of attention. If you have specific
maintainers/packages, please send a mail to mia@qa.debian.org. See also
http://bugs.debian.org/wnpp (and the archive page thereof) and look for
bugs submitted by Martin Michlmayr or myself, and you'll notice how many
packages actually get orphaned by this effort. It's just a tad slow
process, and if apparantly nobody cares enough to NMU and/or raise
issues with a package on some mailinglist, orphaning isn't of much use
to the user either -- the package probably ultimately gets removed then.
I do plan to start up a more structural package checking effort after
Sarge is released, hopefully addressing at least part of your concerns.
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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