Re: NCO maintainer MIA
Hello,
Sorry for the delay. I was out of town last week at a conference, and I
have only now managed to tackle the large amount of email in my mailbox.
Earlier this spring, I had sincerely hoped to be able to spend the
necessary time to get my packages updated, particularly nco and
pcmcia-cs. Unfortunately, an unexpected personal emergency involving my
family has prevented me from doing this.
NCO is being actively developed upstream, and since I no longer use
NetCDF as frequently since beginning my new job last year. I do not
have the time to sufficiently maintain it. I would be pleased to hand
over maintenance of the package to Charlie or Rorik.
The pcmcia-cs package also needs significant work. Although I managed
to fix numerous bugs in November, I have not been able to go through the
laborious process of building a new set of modules. Since Per Olofsson
has demonstrated high interest in this set of packages by corresponding
on numerous bug reports, I recommend that he assume maintainership
of the package. This package is very dear to me, since I have put
in a considerable amount of work in the seven years that I actively
maintained it. I would be honored to serve in an advisory role in the
maintainership of this package; however, I simply do not have the time
and resources now to build all of the sets of modules that are required.
With nco and pcmcia-cs out of the way, my workload is much reduced. I
should be able to handle the work required to maintain the remaining set
of packages, which also have suffered neglect, since I have regarded
them as lower priority than the two mentioned above.
I am terribly sorry for the delay, and I am sorry that I have been
unavailable for much of the spring. I am now available to answer
questions and provide help or resources (such as the CVS repositories
that I have maintained).
Thank you,
Brian
Charlie Zender <zender@uci.edu> wrote:
> 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
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