Re: Mechanism for removing developers

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

John Goerzen wrote:
> In light if this, I ask if we have some mechanism for either removing a
> developer from Debian if they have serious lack of responsibility issues, or
> at least of declaring their packages orphaned and up for adoption.  If not,
> I would like to ask that we consider drafting a policy for such a situation.

We have done things like this informally, before.  Helmut Geyer was
maintainer of libc6, but David Engel took it over after it was clear
that the lack of maintenance for libc6 was delaying the hamm release.
On some other occasions we've declared a maintainer's packages orphaned.

The drawback of this informal process is that it's somewhat political.
The advantage is that without a set policy for it, we're not tempted
to do it too lightly.  There's also a natural balance, in that it's
much harder to do this with a maintainer who speaks up during the
process :-)

I think we might get good results from an organized, non-intrusive,
regular maintainer-ping.  Ideas for this have been kicked around
for a while.  The general idea is that someone automatically detects
"active" maintainers (based on mails to the lists, package uploads,
that sort of thing), and then pings the rest.

IMO, such a ping should _not_ have any predecided effects.  It should
just generate a list of maintainers which we should attempt to
contact, to find out if they're still with the project.  (One of the
things that an automated ping can't do is ask around to see if thay
have a new email address).

Richard Braakman