NCO maintainer MIA

[Charlie Zender <zender@uci.edu>]

Hi,

I'm Charlie Zender, primary author of the netCDF Operators (NCO).
Brian Mays maintained the Debian NCO package for a number of years
until about two years ago. We thank him for pioneering NCO in Debian.
However, Brian has not kept track with the upstream version for about
two years. We (another NCO developer, Rorik Peterson, and I) 
encouraged Brian to keep in sync with NCO releases numerous times.

I followed these procedures for contacting inactive maintainers:

http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ch-beyond-pkging.en.html#s-mia-qa

A month ago I formally asked Brian to sponsor me and Rorik as the
Debian NCO maintainer. We heard nothing so two weeks ago we sent a
followup to debian-devel@lists.debian.org. Again, no response from
Brian. Martin Michlmeyer verified that Brian has been busy and tried
to contact him as well. Still no word.

I am now formally asking that Debian transition NCO maintainership
to me and Rorik Peterson <ffrap1@uaf.edu> over some reasonable
timescale. Rorik and I are both Debian users. We implemented what
we feel is a high-quality, up-to-date, Debian compliant, package
for NCO and have been distributing from the NCO homepage:

http://nco.sf.net#dbn
http://nco.sf.net/src/nco_2.9.6-1_i386.deb
http://nco.sf.net/src/nco_2.9.6-1.dsc
http://nco.sf.net/src/nco_2.9.6-1.tar.gz

Please verify for yourselves the quality of the packaging and 
let us know what you decide and whether we need to make any changes.
We are very eager to begin regular updates of NCO to Sid.

Thanks,
Charlie
-- 
Charlie Zender, surname@uci.edu, (949) 824-2987, Department of Earth 
System Science, University of California, Irvine CA 92697-3100