Hello. During the last week or two I've spent some time looking through the packages with RC bugs, mostly those that are removed from testing, have popcon 100+ and don't have recent activity on the bug report. I skipped bugs like "depends on obsolete piece of software" or "crashes in some circumstances", most of the bugs were FTBFSes caused by obsolete packaging or incompatibilities of the old code with the current environment. Unsurprisingly, most of these packages didn't have a maintainer upload since e.g. 2012 and have the RC bug open for last 3+ months. Some of them have some team in the Maintainer header, some have people in Uploaders who never made an upload. Some of them had 3 NMUs in last 3 years. * So, the first question is: should I spend my time on getting these packages back to testing so they would be a part of the next release? Or should I spend my time on other RC bugs fixing which will help release stretch faster? Next, I contacted all maintainers or such packages, telling them that their package X had its last maintaner upload on X and has an RC bug #X since X, asking them to orphan the package if they are not interested in it anymore and to also orphan other their packages they are not interested in. I've sent about 30 emails in last 6 days. I've got 9 immediate answers. 3 were "should be orphaned". 2 were "I will try to fix this". 1 was "I will fix the package" but about a different package. 1 was "should be orphaned, though we don't have a standard method to orphan team packages". 1 was "I will move to a team" and I answered "a package needs a human maintainer". 1 was "why are you asking me, I am only an uploader, the package is team maintained" even though that person was the only actual uploader (since 2002 till 2012). I've sent the list of my pings to the MIA team. * So: is it a real problem that there are packages that should be marked as orphaned but they aren't? Should we spend any effort on marking more orphaned packages? If yes, how should we do that? * Also: what should we do with packages that are marked as team-maintained but are really orphaned? When fixing the RC bugs I always looked through other bugs in the same package and applied trivial patches to the packaging. I've added debian/source/format where it was missing. In some cases I've completely replaced the packaging with 4-line d/rules. In at least two cases I fixed empty -dbgsym packages. * So, the final question: how much time should pass since the last maintainer upload (since removal from testing, since the first still unfixed RC bug, how many NMUs should exist since the last maintainer upload) to be able to just do a QA upload (without changing the Maintainer field as it's prohibited on the https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/MIA page) instead of finely-crafting minimal diffs and fixing only things allowed by devref 5.11.1? -- WBR, wRAR
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