Re: What to do when a maintainer is blocking maintenance for stretch?
On 08/11/16 20:23, Peter Colberg wrote:
> 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?
You can do an upload to DELAYED/10 or similar, then send a notice and a debdiff
to a bug report. The maintainer can always cancel your upload if he so desires,
and if he keeps being MIA, you get your changes in the archive in time for stretch.
At least that's probably what I would do.
Cheers,
Emilio
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