Intent to hijack Bacula

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>]

Hello,

I intend to take over the Bacula package.  I would first like to say
thanks to Jose Luis Tallon for initially packaging it for Debian and
maintaining it for these years.

A brief history of why I intend to do this:

 * Bacula has had RC bugs open for more than a year.  It was removed
   from testing several months ago because of this.

 * Bacula's current maintainer is not a Debian Developer and has been
   in NM since 2003.

 * Bacula as it currently exists in sid is unbuildable and
   uninstallable.  Bacula will not be present in etch unless significant
   problems are fixed.

 * The last upload for Bacula was almost a year ago.

 * The maintainer has repeatedly, over the last year, said he's working
   on this but hasn't made much real progress, and has made no upload to
   Debian.

 * Several additional critical-level or grave-level unreported bugs
   exist in the bacula Debian source tree (such as stopping database servers
   without permission and deleting files un-owned by a particular
   package)

 * There are various policy compliance issues with the current packages.

 * The current maintainer does respond to pings, but has a long record
   of problems getting bugs (even RC bugs) fixed in a timely fashion.
 
I have already prepared an NMU that fixes 22 bugs, including all four RC
bugs.  I have tagged those bugs as pending.  This release is currently
sitting in NEW.  I also prepared subsequent NMUs that fix critical, but
unreported, bugs in the Debian Bacula packages.

Fixing the rest of the problems with Bacula requires a level of work
that is not really appropriate for an NMU.  I have discussed the
situation with Jose's AM, Stephen Frost, who encouraged me to hijack the
package.  I have also discussed the situation on #debian-devel, and
consensus there seemed to be that a hijack was warranted.

Finally, I should add that we intend to use Bacula at my workplace and
have made the fixes already made to Bacula as part of my job.  We will
be using it in a production environment, and I do not want to do that
until I can trust the Bacula packages to work right.  We will be backing
up 2-5TB of data across Debian, AIX, and Windows servers to a 48-tape
LTO3 library.  In short, I will be maintaining working Bacula packages
anyway, and I might as well upload them to Debian.

I also e-mailed Jose about the situation, offering to adopt Bacula, on
April 27, but have not yet received a reply to that message.

-- John