Hi, Le 15 mai 08 à 20:17, Mike Bird a écrit :
Nevertheless, non-DD's can and do help by filing bug reports and patches (upstream is best), helping people on d-u, and offering constructive advice to DDs.
And maintaining packages! It can be long to find a sponsor for your first package (especially if it's a very specialized software no DD uses), but you don't need to go through NM to become a (co-) maintainer. If you feel the itch, please step forward of adopt an orphaned package, as you noted there's a large pool to choose from. If you look a package with a "request for help", you're sponsor is found already: your prospective comaintainer.
Besides, many packages are orphaned because they are obsolete. If nobody adopts them and they get too buggy, they'll be terminated eventually. The only alternative would be to remove them right away when the maintainer feels he doesn't care anymore, but this would be worse (unless the package was so obsolete that only the maintainer still used it).
Cheers, Thibaut (DM, not DD).