How to deal with "Maintainer unknown" bugreports
Currently, there are over a hundered bug reports in the bug tracking system
that are filed under "maintainer unknown"
(http://www.debian.org/Bugs/db/ma/l-28_unknown-29_.html).
In my experience, there are a few categories to be seen in these
- Bug reports with missing Package: pseudo-header (or one not recognised by
debbugs, e.g. in Pine-generated MIME).
- Bug reports with a misspelled Package: pseudo-header.
- General help requests
- Spam messages
- Bug reports for packages not in "stable" or "unstable":
- concerning packages in Incoming
- old bug reports
Now that we have released 2.1, a lot of the bug reports are now "maintainer
unknown" as they concern packages no longer in 'stable' or 'unstable'.
I've reassigned a number of these to their successor or closest relative
packages (e.g. slang0.99.38 -> slang1).
Still this leaves a large amount of bug reports for packages that we simply
do not have anymore (e.g. nfsroot, kde*).
Perhaps it is time to develop some kind of policy to deal with these
reports, and to institutionalise regular cleanup of "maintainer unknown" bug
report through debian-qa?
Ray
--
UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried
to cheat them out of and didn't manage. See also DISHONESTY, SNEAKY,
UNDERHAND and JUST LUCKY I GUESS.
- The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan
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