Felipe Sateler wrote:
On Thursday 24 April 2008 08:36:52 Joost Yervante Damad wrote:In my opinion the packages would be better served if they just had individual maintainers assigned. This is one of the reasons I removed my timidity package from the debian-multimedia team.I think packages would be better served by real team collaboration. What I saw was that d-m was just a place where people ask for a sponsor for multimedia-related packages instead of a place where people ask for (and receive) help maintaining their packages, which is what I think is more useful (does this happen in pkg-multimedia?).
My own position on this will always be pragmatic: let's do what keeps the most up-to date versions of multimedia packages in Debian, which seems to be a bit of both in practice. The 'official' position AFAIU is that packages should be maintained by an individual DD. However I don't think this is an argument against real team collaboration, for now I would appreciate it if we could keep the discussion alive on debian-multimedia. The fact is, also, that several of the packages are maintained by non-DDs via sponsors and I for one am grateful for all these efforts. I have had discussions with debian-qa types who have tried to tell me that this is an abuse of the system, but I think it's fairer to describe it as sub-optimal. So far, no-one has really tried to make an issue of it, which is nice. I guess we're all reasonably familiar with Debian politic.
I don't maintain any packages, so I'm not on pkg-multimedia-maintainers, my understanding is that p-m-m *is* the place for actual collaborative maintenance. I'm happy to do a bit of supportive admin, keep an eye on qa issues and generally try to make sure everyone keeps communicating. I'm also more than happy to lend a hand with non-programming issues such as iconography and documentation if anyone would find that useful. I'm open to constructive suggestions, as always.
Right now, I think the most important thing is to keep communicating and focus on getting the maximum number of multimedia packages to build cleanly on all architectures under lenny; and then to clearly deprecate the rest. Are there any packages that we already *know* are dead? I'm sad to lose tapiir and om (ingen), but I haven't found time to compile them either and I guess that's how we sort the wheat from the chaff.
cheers, tim