Debian OpenSSH commit access

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

Various folks have asked me in the past about the possibility of helping
out with Debian OpenSSH packaging. Until now I've always had to
regretfully put them off as I had no way to offer them commit access,
since I was using a CVS repository on a private host for historical
reasons.

I've now migrated all my CVS history to a true distributed VCS branch
based off an import of upstream's CVS repository. As far as I can tell,
I've lost none of anyone's history in the process, which I'm quite proud
of given the craziness that was going on with vendor branches. :-)
Instructions on dealing with the new repository are here:

  http://bzr.debian.org/loggerhead/pkg-ssh/openssh/trunk/annotate/head:/debian/README.source

I'd now like to get back in touch with those people who offered help and
take them up on their offer. Unfortunately, without computer assistance,
I have a memory like a thing with holes in, and a number of these
contacts were at Debian conferences and the like. If you have spoken
with me in the past about helping out with OpenSSH and you're still
interested, could you please contact me privately using this e-mail
address? I'd like to explore the possibility of getting a few more
people involved in co-maintenance of this vital package.

If you haven't spoken with me in the past about this but are
nevertheless interested, then tasks that badly need attention are
roughly what you might expect, given that the most immediate problem is
the fact that the bug list is so large it tends to obscure urgent items:

  * Go through the bug list looking for upstreamable bugs, especially
    those with patches that look reasonable, forward them to upstream
    Bugzilla, and mark the Debian bugs as forwarded.

  * Look for bugs that have already been fixed (preferably if you can
    trace the fix to an individual commit, rather than just "I can't
    reproduce this any more" which might just mean that your
    circumstances differ from the reporter's) and close them.

  * Find reasonably accessible bugs, produce patches, and send them
    upstream.

For good measure, I've also added PuTTY to the pkg-ssh repository. If
any other maintainers of SSH implementations in Debian are interested in
joining this project, please get in touch.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@debian.org]