What to do about negligent maintainers?
Hi all,
it seems we have some maintainers not maintaining their packages
properly, letting both RC and non-RC bugs pile up. The last example
which has been discussed extensively on #debian-devel is anibal. His
list of packages maintained include core packages like: nfs-common,
portmap and libpng as well as less core, but widely used packages like
fping, libx86 and gparted.
Taking a look at the bug list, it consists of no less than 12 RC bugs
across 9 packages, with only two bug reports having had any response
from the maintainer.
I am not sure what we should do with problems like this. Not doing
anything sends a signal that DDs are held to a different standard than
DMs and NMs. I don't think that is a signal we should send.
Ideally, we should be able to ask the maintainer to scale back and they
do so. However, what should we do if they either don't respond or
disagree? The TC can already rule over maintainership so perhaps that
is enough and we don't need any more procedures or rules to handle those
cases?
--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
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