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Matthew Vernon MIA (Was: biosquid and Hmmer)

Hi,

I attach a mail of Nelson A. de Oliveira in the end of this mail and ask
for your advise.  Nelson is in the NM queue and I'm sponsoring his packages.
He did a great job in the past and I want to hear your opinion about my
suggestion:

  IMHO it would be best to start with group maintainance.  So I would suggest
  to add Nelson to the uploaders field.  Thus the package is not really
  stolen but we can find a reasonable way to update the package for the
  time Matthew might have time constraints.  I would volunteer to sponsor
  the package for Nelson.

Matthew & QA-team, what do you think about this.

Kind regards

         Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de

On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Nelson A. de Oliveira wrote:


Hi Andreas!

As you saw, I have filled an ITP on biosquid. But there will be a
problem. It will conflict with Hmmer.

I saw that Hmmer on Debian is really outdated. It's a version from 2001!
It looks like that the maintainer Matthew Vernon <matthew@debian.org>
is MIA (it's what I think). There are 4 bugs opened for hmmer.
I have sent an email offering help to get the package updated, but
I've got no answer from Matthew. As I could see, the last upload that
Matthew did was on January of this year. And this was to another
package, not hmmer.
Since I don't have access to some tools that only DDs have (like
mia-history), I can't tell with sure if he is really MIA.

Asking about those questions on #debian-devel, they said that it's the
QA team that handles MIA persons and orphans packages that are not
maintained anymore.
Some developers said about doing a NMU too.

I have interest in updating hmmer, because some people at our lab are
using it. Also, with an update hmmer, it won't conflict with the new
biosquid and neither with ncbi-tools-bin.
And the 4 bugs will be closed (there are bugs with more than 2 years).

I also contacted the upstream author of hmmer to see if it's actually
active. He said that yes. The last release was on year 2003. He didn't
release a new version because there were no bugs, as he said.

I don't know what to do on that situation. I don't want to steal his
package, but if it gets orphan, I have interest in maintaining it.

Also, this outdated version of hmmer is now "split" on the new hmmer
version and biosquid. Some binaries are on hmmer and others on
biosquid. Because this I have filled and ITP on biosquid, to allow
Debian users to have everything that they had on the old hmmer.

Thank you very much!

--
Nelson A. de Oliveira
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