On Thu, 03 Aug 2017 21:25:32 +0200, Christian Seiler wrote: Thanks for your long and elaborate email. Unfortunately I find myself disagreeing with your two main points: > I wonder whether we are framing this in the right way anyway. There > are two orthogonal questions in my mind: > - is a specific person MIA? > - is a package still maintained? Ack, separating these questions makes sense to me. > On the other hand you could have a package that has > Maintainer: some team and Uploaders: some person, where "some > person" is actually MIA, but the rest of the team is still actively > maintaining the package. Right, I think that's the situation that the proponents of this change have in mind. > The main problem I see with Uploaders: is that it's often not really > up to date. So I do think that it might be a good idea to track the > people who are responsible for a package outside of the package > itself in some kind of central database that is not tied to package > uploads. […] So I don't think the Uploaders: > field in a package is useless, I just think the current way of > storing that information is not the best way to do so. But until > such a central database is ready for usage, I don't think it would > be wise to drop Uploaders: at the moment, because otherwise that > information can't be tracked at all. Here I disagree: This database would just shift the outdated information to another place; and more generally: I fail to see which problem it solves. I guess this is the general difference in perception we have in this discussion: Some people start from the idea of "responsibility of a human for a team package" while others are happy and have good experiences in teams where all (or enough) members take responsibility for the team packages and feel that a "dedicated human responsible" doesn't make sense in their workflow. What I don't understand in the point of view of the "keep Uploaders" proponents: What does this information, whether correct or not, actually give others? Are they going to email or phone these persons privately when emails to the BTS or the maintainer/team list are ignored? And what happens if they ignore these communications as well? > To help with the question of whether a package is still being > actively maintained, let me frame it in this way: I think it is > not completely unreasonable to say that _most_ packages will be > updated at least once every 12 months in sid or experimental. (The > precise number is subject to bikeshedding.) Of course that's not > true for every package, there are some packages which don't require > updates that often. So what one could do is the following: a > package is considered to be actively maintained if a maintainer (or > team) upload has happened in the last 12 months. (NMUs don't count.) > If that is not the case, after 12 months an email is automatically > sent to the maintainer/uploaders to ask whether they are still > actively maintaining the package. I'm sorry but this feels like loads of paperwork for active teams with tons of package which might not need an upload each $months. I mean, in the worst case we could script the replies to the pings but I'd rather not go there :) Cheers, gregor -- .''`. https://info.comodo.priv.at/ - Debian Developer https://www.debian.org : :' : OpenPGP fingerprint D1E1 316E 93A7 60A8 104D 85FA BB3A 6801 8649 AA06 `. `' Member of VIBE!AT & SPI, fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe `-
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