Seeking co-maintainer for adduser
Hi,
Adduser is rapidly nearing its 10th birthday and has been maintained
by Roland Bauerschmidt since 2000. In 2004, I joined the adduser team,
and have done most of the work in adduser in the last year.
The code in adduser is old, non-modular, "spaghetti-like", in two
words: Needs rewriting. The main cause is that adduser relies on
shadow and password do to the real work and thus interfaces badly with
more modern methods of user management like NIS and LDAP which are
rapidly increasing in their importance. For a more closer roundup of
missing features, take a look into adduser's BTS entry.
Roland is currently very busy with his non-Debian life and it is
unclear whether he will have time to spend on adduser in the future.
Regarding me, I will take the time to fix urgent bugs in adduser, but
I won't implement any new features, and I surely won't participate in
the rewrite of adduser which has been started multiple times, with its
most prominent result being adduser-ng in the archive. However, the
adduser-ng packages haven't seen maintainer action in a quite long
time and I'm inclined to call adduser-ng abandoned.
This e-mail is going out to solicit co-maintainers for the adduser
package. My ideal candidate:
- Is willing to spend time not only on improving the old adduser
code base, but also in the rewrite which _must_ come sooner or later
to improve interaction with different user database backends
- Knows about NIS, LDAP and other user database backends
- Is familiar with translation infrastructure for debconf templates,
man pages and program texts
- Knows how to interface with other maintainers (shadow, ldap, nis)
and translators
- Will first write a test suite for the package before touching the
actual code
adduser is a very important package for Debian, and it's a shame that
it doesn't get the attention it needs. I am afraid that only the most
important bug fixes will be done for the package until somebody
volunteers to put more manpower into it.
New members of the adduser team do not need to be full DDs, I can
sponsor the packages.
People interested, please subscribe to the adduser-devel mailing list
(http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/adduser-devel), say
hello, take a look at the bugs open in the BTS, and start submitting
patches. I will eventually hand out commit privileges to the project
svn to people who have successfully submitted patches. Commit
privileges to the project svn will be handed out immediately if
somebody comes up with actually new code for the rewrite.
Thanks for helping!
Greetings
Marc
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Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header
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