I think you've missed the point of my message. I have no problem with doing
porter NMUs, or providing porter patches for build failures, where this is
required; but if a maintainer isn't taking care of even those
release-critical build failures for which a patch has been available for 6
months, in what sense is this maintainer actually maintaining the package at
all? Six months without an upload is reasonable if the package is in good
shape, but crystalspace is definitely not in good shape right now.
I'm not going to let my enthusiasm for alpha porting get in the way of
considering whether packages are unmaintained and need to be marked as such.
Hrm, crystalspace is *very* far away from compiling "on all archs"; it's up
to date in unstable on only 3 of 12 architectures, and it looks like there's
yet another (unfiled) RC bug on the package because it build-depends on
python2.3-dev which is no longer available, so it will currently fail to
build on *all* archs.
It's the fact that there has been no visible forward progress on these build
failures in over a year since the package was last uploaded that most
concerns me.