Re: negative vote for maintainer Michael Gilbert
On Thu, 05 Jan 2012, W. van den Akker wrote:
> On Thu, 2012-01-05 at 10:03 -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > If you're lucky, you get a few
> > responses from people saying they want to help but with no idea how to go
> > about it, ...
>
> To be a little off-topic but... I have many times offered my help to
> maintain orphaned and non-orphaned
> packages, but I was lucky when I got a response. Mostly I didnt got any.
Don't offer help, just do it. Send in patches to the BTS, send email
offering to co-maintain the package (when applicable), and if you don't get
a reply in two weeks, prepare an NMU, send the NMU patch to the BTS, and ask
for sponsoring of a *delayed* NMU on debian-mentors...
If you want to help maintain an orphaned package, it is more
straightforward: Send all proposed changes as patches through the BTS, and
ask on debian-qa for a upload (debian-qa has authority over all orphaned
packages). You can even adopt the package if you find yourself a
mentor/sponsor in debian-mentors and you're interested enough in it to take
good care of it for a while.
I believe the developers' reference explains orphaned packages, debian-qa
and the current procedures for NMUs.
> How much I like debian, the maintainers are not very beginners friendly
> (however there are some exceptions).
That's sadly often true. However, when overworked maintainers are the
subject, it may be that they're not being responsive at all to anyone at
that time...
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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