What to do when a maintainer is blocking maintenance for stretch?
Dear Debian developers,
A package with a password-changing daemon I am using with a webmail
interface has not seen an upload for 6 years. As a result, minor bugs
have been accumulating at a steady pace, until the package was finally
removed from testing in July due to an FTBFS. Since the maintainer had
been inactive for so long and had not responded to the corresponding
RC bug, I offered to help improve the package back in September.
The maintainer did not respond, so I contacted the MIA team, which
succeeded instantly in getting a response from the maintainer that
they were still active. However, since the maintainer continued to
not respond to the RC bug or to my offer to help, I uploaded an NMU
to DELAYED/7 via sponsorship by debian-mentors.
The package is now back in testing. It is riddled with less-than-RC
issues relating to security, inaccurate licensing, and other QA issues
flagged by lintian. As an alternative to inetd, I would like to ship
a systemd unit that restricts the privileges of the daemon, which runs
as root and currently (unnecessarily) listens on all interfaces.
Improving the package would require significant changes that are not
appropriate for a minimal NMU. With the maintainer not responding to
anything other than MIA requests to retain their maintainer status,
is there any other way to get the package back in shape for stretch?
Regards,
Peter
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