Reaching out to maintainers of non-team-maintained packages

[Dominic Hargreaves <dom@earth.li>]

At the Debian Perl team BOF at Debconf we discussed reaching out to
maintainers of perl modules which are not team maintained. Whilst the
discussion was partly about identifying and picking up packages which
are under-maintained, we also thought it would be nice to invite all
such packages into the team. One proposal was to use wishlist bugs for
this. This has the disadvantage of spamming maintainers with
many packages, though, so instead, in such cases, we could mail the
maintainer directly (though there is a definite advantage to using bugs
to track responses).

The criterial I am using to identify the packages/maintainers in
question (via UDD queries) are:

- package is named lib*-perl
- package is in unstable
- maintainer is not a team

There are 253 packages from 95 maintainers meeting these criteria.
These packages have 141 open bugs, including 9 RC.

The last upload date of these packages ranged from 2006-08-11 to
2017-08-05, with 142 of the packages not having had an upload since
the jessie release.

I find these metrics interesting, but on the other hand I am not
inclined to use them to filter the messages or particularly target
any packages in particular, just sent a friendly email to each of the
maintainers. We could follow up individually with individual
packages/bugs if appropriate.

Here is my proposed email to maintainers (whether via a bug report
or not):

------
Subject: invitation for you and your package to join the pkg-perl team

Dear $maintainer,

In the Debian Perl team, we have been looking at perl module packages
which are not team maintained and considering whether the lives of
these packages can be made better (for example, by reducing the overhead
and increasing the consistency of that packaging), by suggesting that
they be moved to the pkg-perl team.

There is no obligation, of course, to do this, but if you would either
like to move any or all of your module packages to the team, you can
either request to join the team and do that yourself, or just reply to
this email asking for the package(s) in question to be adopted by the
team.

You can find out more about the team and how to join it at
<http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/>.

The packages in question are [in the case of a single mail to a maintainer]
listed below:

[list of packages]

Thanks for your work in maintaining Debian!

Best wishes
Dominic.
Debian Perl Team
------

Thoughts welcome!

Cheers,
Dominic.