Uploaders orphaning packages / Conda (Was: Bug#921382: kineticstools: autopkgtest needs update for new version of h5py)

[Andreas Tille <tille@debian.org>]

Hi Afif,

please lets move this to the list  I guess it is fine to quote your
non-privat text here.

On Tue, Feb 05, 2019 at 01:03:26AM -0500, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
> 
> The
> problem is I'm not sure how filing an RFA or orphaning a package works
> within a team. I think what I should have done in the beginning is send
> out a message on the debian-med list asking for someone to take over and
> then formally orphan/remove the ones that didn't get adopted.

You could start with removing yourself as Uploader which is a clear sign
that you will not work on this any more.  I might consider adding myself
to make sure we have at least one uploader in the team.  I do not see
any reason to remove packages that are functional and not RC buggy (over
several releases).

> >  I remember you
> > said you are not using these any more but the same is true for me - I
> > never ever used any of those packages and I spent a lot of time on these
> > anyway>  I wonder whether you might be able to become active and deal
> > with the issues on the packages where you are in the Uploaders field.
> 
> I don't think you should spend time on the packages you have no interest
> in, either.

What means "interest"?  If it is I should not spend time on packages I'm
not using for my own work I can leave Debian Med since I'm not using a
single one.  As a Debian maintainer I want to provide a useful system
for my colleagues and the motivation to maintain also packages that are
not used here is to possibly attract even more people to join the
effort.  This attraction of people has worked to some extend (way better
than in other teams but admittedly I was hoping for more active
contributors).

> What I would be willing to do is file for removal of the
> packages where I'm listed as the sole uploader.

I do not think that we should remove packages with some popcon users
that are not RC buggy.
 
> Even if I was still using the packages, it is much less motivating to
> maintainer Debian packages for scientific software than something
> vendor-neutral and user-installable like conda, which has become very
> popular in bioinformatics. In fact, all these PacBio packages that I had
> created for Debian are now packaged in conda by upstream itself.

Honestly, I think the conda-hype has some positive effects also for our
packaging.  I realised that upstreams learned that release tags are a
good idea, responding to issues of packagers is more frequent and so on.
IMHO software that is fit for Conda packaging has increased chances to
be not hard to package for Debian as well.  I do not see Conda as a pure
competitor to our efforts since there are also different areas where the
different packaging efforts are differently suited.  However, by all
means we should force the effort to package the Conda tools themselves
in any case.

Kind regards

       Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de