On Thursday, June 5, 2025 10:53:17 AM Mountain Standard Time Ahmad Khalifa
wrote:
Looks like you took over maintainership completely. Not that you
provided help and collaborated with the original maintainer.
This looks more like a package that should have been orphaned long ago
when it was removed from testing. The RFH just helped you stumble upon it.
The situation was a little more nuanced than that. It is correct to say that
the package should have been orphaned. By the time I started looking at it,
the prior maintainer was completely unresponsive. I attempted to contact him
several times offering to co-maintain the package, but never received a
response.
My interest in the package was that I use it myself and it was not in good
shape. I did not find the package by looking directly at RFH bugs, but rather
by looking at the packages’ tracker page:
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/courier
One of the nice things about tracker is that it prominently lists open RFH
bugs in the top center. I went to the page to determine why the package was
no longer in testing and discovered that it would soon be entirely removed
from Debian due to serious bugs. The RFH bug indicated that at some point in
the past, before the previous maintainer had become completely unresponsive,
he had been willing to accept help maintaining the package.
When I was not successful in contacting the previous maintainer, I adopted the
package.
If there had not been an RFH bug, I would have had to do a formal salvage
process, which I might not have started or which might have taken longer. The
RFH bug was a nice open door saying, “Come on in”. It meant that I could
start working on the package while waiting to hear back from the maintainer,
(which never happened). If it hadn’t been for the RFH, Courier would likely
not have made it into trixie.
This is a very complex piece of software with a lot of non-trivial open bugs
and some antiquated package design. Many people use the software in ways I
don’t. Making changes too quickly would likely end up unintentionally
breaking production systems. However, I was able to safely clean it up enough
to get it into trixie. Going forward, I expect it will take about 2 years to
full clean up the package and all outstanding bugs.
As has already been mentioned in this thread, RFH bugs are often filed when
maintainers are looking for experienced co-maintainers, usually with very
difficult packages, which are often in bad shape. As such, they should
probably be understood as Request For Experienced Developers To Help (but
RFEDTH is a little long). They are probably the very last thing that a new
contributor would be prepared to tackle. It might be best to adjust our
documentation to not steer new contributors towards them, but rather towards
the debian-mentors mailing list, where people can point them to some beginning
tasks if they ask.