Lars Wirzenius wrote:
On ke, 2008-01-09 at 11:10 +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:This is my context, but my question is generic. How are packages maintained by developers that resign handled, and how should they be handled.Why should they be handled differently from any other packages whosemaintainers are suspected of doing a bad job?
Because we know (or can reasonably assume) that a resigned developer isn't going to continue to actively maintain any of their packages.
What are the reasons for _not_ orphaning those packages? I guess if it's bug-free with regular users (i.e. Ain't Broke), we don't necessarily want to enter the package into a removal process immediately.
The delays in taking over packages are big even when the people in question haven't resigned. It's just something we live with, in my opinion.
I'm not entirely convinced by this argument.
Developers resign infrequently, and usually explicitly orphan any remaining packages they have. Thus I don't see the need for a formal procedure to handle this; we have enough procedures and bureacracy already. Common sense and good sense applied on a case-by-case basis seems reasonable to me.
It would provide clarity for people like Petter in future and remove any obstacles to finding a new maintainer. Otherwise the package would need to find a group-maintained 'foster-home' such as debian-qa or debian-multimedia for example, which is a lot more complicated and tends to fudge the issue. There are already too many packages being maintained this way. Surely !maintainer == orphaned by definition, even if Ain't Broke is True?
No? Or am I just digging up the roses? cheers, tim