Re: Why not scan for unmaintained packages and orphan them?

[Matthias Julius <lists@julius-net.net>]

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> There are a fair number of lintian wishlist bugs in that category.  I
> suppose I could send a form letter in response to each one of them, but
> I'm not sure how useful that really is.  I try to get to wishlist bugs for
> new checks when I have a chance, with the probability of inclusion raised
> significantly (but not to 100%) by having a patch attached to the bug.

I understand that replying to every bug requires some extra effort and
I don't necessarily want to make it a must.  But a response like "I
have seen your report.  Unfortunately I don't have the time right now
to take care of it.  If you send a patch I will consider it." is a
nice gesture to the reporter.

I have started doing some l10n work about a month ago.  Some of the
bugs I filed have not seen any reaction from the maintainer.  While
that is not yet surprising I came across a number of l10n bugs
providing translations that are half a year old or older.  This is
frustrating to the translator to see his work collecting dust in the
BTS for such a long time.

And those bugs are easy and straight forward to fix and don't require
much thinking.

Matthias