Re: Request to Hijack libdbd-sybase-perl
Okay,
I admit I look like an asshole here. And I suppose I am not being too
nice about this. I apologize to Steve if this looks like a personal
attack, I admit that in some ways it was. because I was upset when I
wrote this mail. The first thought that went through my mind when
reading through the bug reports filed on this module were, "How could
somebody leave bugs open for over 6 years?" -- Mind you, six years is
a long time in the IT world.
The way I see it, and I would hope Debian Developers (in general)
agree that either a package should be appropriately maintained or
orphaned.
I understand that Steve (vorlon) is very active in the Debian and
Ubuntu communities, and I'm grateful for all that. He's doing a lot of
work with shaping new policies which is of really great importance,
and I'm glad he's investing his talent to something so beneficial to
both the Debian and Ubuntu communities. I also understand he's
probably really busy, with life, with other commitments... all of
which are probably of a higher priority than libdbd-sybase-perl.
I want to see the package appropriately maintained, whether that is by
Steve or by myself (or by someone else) doesn't matter. While I
understand things like upgrading a package can't get fixed right away,
3+ years to upgrade from 1.00 to 1.06 seems a bit excessive to me.
So, please, please tell me how to proceed from here. Do we continue
keeping an outdated (and next to useless) package in Debian? Do we
ignore the various bug fixes which have included segfaults in older
versions? Should we ask that users simply install this package from
CPAN (thus defeating the entire purpose of having libdbd-sybase-perl
in Debian)?
Cheers,
Jonathan
On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 3:42 PM, Jonathan Yu<jonathan.i.yu@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi:
>
> libdbd-sybase-perl is a Debian package maintained by Steve Langasek
> <vorlon@debian.org>. It is also quite outdated, and there are bugs
> filed against it dating from 6+ years ago.
>
> I have e-mailed the maintainer of the package directly, then
> subsequently filed a follow-up request to the initial bug report by
> Florian Ragwitz over 3 years ago informing the maintainer that there
> is a new upstream version, which has various fixes.
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=329526
>
> He replied to that bug, but I don't really understand his response. He
> is not technically MIA as he has quite a bit of activity on the
> mailing lists (I see him participating quite actively on debian-policy
> and debian-devel), though he does have a tendency to ignore bug
> reports or other e-mails.
>
> I would really like to know the procedure for taking over a module
> (under the auspices of the pkg-perl team), given that he's not really
> MIA but seems to refuse to upgrade it without explanation. It would be
> nice if he actually maintained the package and closed some of the
> outstanding bugs, but I would be just as happy to take over the
> package as part of pkg-perl and maintain it under our team.
>
> I prefer not to do an NMU, especially since he does occasionally
> respond to e-mails. And he seems to suggest (from our interaction on
> the bug tracker) that I'm not really allowed to do so.
>
> I have asked him how to proceed but received no response to that
> either. So, I'm hoping debian-qa will have the solution.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jonathan
>
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