Re: RFC: Why are so many debian packages outdated?
Michael Gilbert <mgilbert@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 6:09 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> In this case, the maintainer is definitely not MIA. Prompted by this
>> thread, I looked over the open bugs (and took the liberty of tagging a
>> couple since I was looking them over anyway), and they seem fairly
>> well-triaged to me and most have a maintainer response.
> True. Part of the problem is appropriate terminology. This is a case
> of what I would call an "undermaintained" package. Even though the
> maintainer is still around, and may be quite active elsewhere, this
> package has not gotten any attention in 2 years (even though multiple
> upstreams have been released in the meantime).
Putting aside this specific example, I don't think the criteria you're
using to evaluate whether a package is undermaintained is valid. It's not
always correct that maintainers should be blindly packaging every upstream
release, and if upstream releases are minor and not important to Debian,
it's perfectly reasonable to not prioritize that packaging among the
various other things that one is doing.
> This would be a case where I think liberal NMUing would certainly be
> appropriate (of course prior to the freeze).
Yeah, I guess that makes sense, *if* the person doing the NMU then owns
any bugs they introduce and of course doesn't do anything drastic like
rewriting the build system. And provides plenty of warning.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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