Debian doesn't have a "core team", should it? can it?

[Peter Michael Green <plugwash@debian.org>]

Recently andreas-tille sent the following message about libzstd to debian-devel

> I'd like to repeat that I'm really convinced that libzstd should *not*
> be maintained in the Debian Med team but rather some core team in
> Debian.  It is here for historic reasons but should have moved somewhere
> more appropriately since it became its general importance.
>       
      
      It ended up being transferred to the rpm team, which got it out of
      the med team's
      hair but I'm not convinced the rpm team satisfies "some core team"
      any better
      than the med team does.
      
      As far as I can tell Debian has broadly 3 types of teams.
      
      1. Teams focussed on an application area, for example the med
      team, the science team, the games team.
      2. Teams focussed on a programming language, for example the
      python team, the perl team, the rust team. There is however no
      such team for software written in C, C++ or shell script.
      3. Teams focussed on a particular piece of software
      
      As far as I can tell this means that there are a bunch of packages
      that "fall between the gaps", packages
      that are of high importance to Debian as a whole but are not a
      great fit for any team. They either end up not associated with a
      team at all or sometimes associated with a team who happened to be
      the first to
      use the library.
      
      I decided to get a sample of packages that could be considered
      "core", obviously different people have different ideas of what
      should be considered core but I decided to do the following to get
      a list of packages that hopefully most people would consider core.
      
      debootstrapped a new sid chroot
      ran tasksel install standard (a bit less spartan than just the
      base system)
      ran apt-get install build-essential (we are an opensource project,
      development tools are essential to us)
      ran apt-get install dctrl-tools (arguablly not core, but I needed
      it to run the test commands and it's only one package)
      
      There were 355 packages installed, built from 223 source packages.
      I got a list of source packages with
      the command
      
      grep-dctrl installed /var/lib/dpkg/status -n -ssource:package |
      cut -d ' ' -f 1 | sort | uniq > sourcepks.txt
      
      I then extracted the source stanzas with.
      
      grep-dctrl -e -F Package `sed "s/.*/^&$/" sourcepks.txt |
      paste -s -d '|'`
      /var/lib/apt/lists/deb.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_source_Sources
      > sourcestanzas.txt
      
      Then wrote a little python script to extract teams from those
      stanzas.
      
      #!/usr/bin/python3
      from debian import deb822
      import collections
      import sys
      f = open(sys.argv[1])
      counts = collections.defaultdict(int)
      for source in deb822.Sources.iter_paragraphs(f):
          maintainers = [source['maintainer']]
          if 'uploaders' in source:
              maintainers += source['uploaders'].split(',')
          maintainers = [s.strip() for s in maintainers if s.strip() !=
      '']
          teams = [s for s in maintainers if ('team' in s.lower()) or
      ('lists' in s.lower()) or ('maintainers' in s.lower()) or ('group'
      in s.lower())]
          teams.sort()
          counts[tuple(teams)] += 1
          #print(repr(maintainers))
          #print(repr(teams));
      
      for teams , count in sorted(counts.items(), key = lambda x: x[1]):
          if len(teams) == 0:
              teamtext = 'no team'
          else:
              teamtext = ', '.join(teams)
          print(str(count) + ' ' + teamtext)
      
      This confirms my suspiscions, of the 223 source packages
      responsible
      for the packages installed in my "reasonablly but not super
      minimal"
      environment more than half of them were not associated with a team
      at all.
      
      I also saw a couple of packages in there maintained by the science
      team
      and the med team. two source packages telnet and apt-listchanges
      were orphaned.
      
      I do not know what the soloution is, whether a "core team" is a
      good idea
      or even whether one is possible at all but I feel this is an
      elephant that
      should have some light shone on it.