On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 11:39:18AM +0200, Gabor Szabo wrote: > hi, > > I am just thinking aloud here: > > If I am not mistaken once in a while (or maybe more frequently) > you encounter a module that lacks copyright information or needs > some code patching in order to include in Debian. > Some you get bug reports that you fix and would want to get it included > the original CPAN module as well. > > If the CPAN author is responsive and make the changes. Great. > > What happens when the author is not responsive? > Do you take over the maintenance of the module? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't really believe that taking over maintainership (if you mean it in the CPAN upload sense) would fix the copyright issues. It would be kind of... uncouth... (not to mention illegal ;) to take over a distribution and then claim copyright over all of the code inherited from the previous authors/maintainers :) So, even in this case, the issue of determining the licensing and copyright information for all of the existing code would still stand, especially WRT uploading to the Debian archive and pleasing our beloved FTP masters :) So the only way I see in such a case is to just not do anything about the module until there is a response from the maintainer. IMHO, anything else would not really satisfy the legal requirements of handling others' code (and documentation, data, etc). > What about maintaining a list of modules that need attention - > as determined by the Debian Perl team - but where you cannot > get a response from the author? > What if we maintained such a list on the TPF wiki > and then we tried to encourage people to take over > maintainer-ship of those specific modules? > > What do you think about this? > how many such modules do you currently have and what is the > frequency of encountering such modules? I *think* I've only had to deal with two such modules - C-Scan (which, I believe, prompted your question) and Module-CPANTS-Analyse, and in both cases the maintainers have been *very* quick to respond and *very* helpful, understanding and obliging. Of course, I've only done a limited amount of Debian Perl Group work, even though I've been a member of the team for a couple of years now; others have come across more such modules (there's been the occassional e-mail crossing the list), but IMHO it's not too often that this happens, and IMHO (though others should share their personal experience here) most maintainers really do respond quickly and with good will. G'luck, Peter -- Peter Pentchev roam@ringlet.net roam@FreeBSD.org peter@packetscale.com PGP key: http://people.FreeBSD.org/~roam/roam.key.asc Key fingerprint FDBA FD79 C26F 3C51 C95E DF9E ED18 B68D 1619 4553 If this sentence were in Chinese, it would say something else.
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