Better team maintenance of orphaned packages (Was: Bug#492503: marked as done (ITA: feh -- imlib2 based image viewer))

[Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de>]

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote:

> Your message dated Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:47:03 +0000
> with message-id <E1KXsKV-0005ZX-7o@ries.debian.org>
> and subject line Bug#492503: fixed in feh 1.3.4.dfsg.1-2
> has caused the Debian Bug report #492503,
> regarding ITA: feh -- imlib2 based image viewer
> to be marked as done.

At DebConf I learned about the existence of the  nice wnpp-alert script.
It is a real shame that this script is somehow hidden below the "noise"
of many other nice scripts.  So I easily detected a set of packages I
would really like to keep in good shape because my day to day work depends
from them.

My first target was the image viewer feh.  As you see I just took over
this package but my experience in several teams has shown that it is
much better to find a team which uses a common repository for packaging
issues.  Unfortunately I can not easily find an appropriate team for
this package.  In the end I could imagine a Debian Imaging DIS
(Debian Integrated Solution - formerly known as CDD, but renamed since
DebConf).  But it would kind of overkill to start a new project for
this - I feel the need for such an effort, but I can not do it myself.
And finally it would not help for my next target gcal - I also would
fail to find a reasonable team.

So my question is: Do you think it makes sense to create a VCS on Alioth
where we could build a pool for those packages that are orphaned or just
taken over and do not find a better home.  I would feel much better if
my packaging stuff would not reside only on my local disk but in a
commonly accessible VCS and the location to this VCS is clearly mentioned
in the VCS fields of the control file.

Any opinions

       Andreas.

--
http://fam-tille.de