Bug#798476: Returning to the requirement that Uploaders: contain humans
Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org> writes:
> Regressing on being able to orphan all packages of a known-MIA/retired
> maintainer would be very bad.
I agree, but that's not directly relevant here, since we're talking about
team-maintained packages. The whole *point* of team maintenance is that
there's no reason to orphan a package just because one team member went
away. If that weren't the case, the package is, *by definition*, not
team-maintained (or the team itself is MIA, which is a different issue as
discussed below).
>> Currently, when the MIA team finds someone who is no longer active,
>> teams have to go do a bunch of work to strip their name out of uploader
>> fields. That work doesn't really make Debian any better; it's just
>> bookkeeping. When the team has other ways of knowing the health of
>> their packages, I'd like to let them not do this bookkeeping.
> You are assuming that the team notices without the current notifications
> from the MIA team that a team member is no longer active in Debian.
I'm really not. I'm pointing out that for a lot of teams, that literally
*does not matter at all*. Absolutely nothing changes about the
maintenance status of many team-maintained packages if the person who last
worked on that package disappears.
Teams often don't notice that someone is MIA because *it doesn't matter*
for their workflow; they're happy to have people come and go.
> You are assuming that the team has a non-zero number of active members
> left after a member becomes MIA.
No, I'm not -- as I pointed out in a separate message, this is a problem
worth solving, but this is an MIA team problem that I think is best
tackled from that angle. If all of a team's packages are bitrotting, then
the team's packages should be orphaned just like we do with an MIA single
maintainer.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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