Re: On the maintenance of Htdig
On Fri, Apr 02, 2010 at 08:03:48PM +0200, Mats Erik Andersson wrote:
> In a separate message I will address matters on the
> package Netpipes
Since the ITA is from 2008 you should simply to the upload netpipes
(respectively try to find a sponsor to upload it) if you don't get an
answer after maybe a week.
> I am responsible for the most recent surgery on Htdig, in the
> form of the package htdig_1:3.2.0b6-9.1. In fear of the label
> 'QA upload' I prepared those changes as NMU, and it was then
> sponsored.
In Debian there is a strong tie between packages and maintainers.
Packages normally have a maintainer who cares for the package,
alternatively to a single maintainer some package have a group of
maintainers. Well, "normally" ... sometimes nobody cares and the
package gets orphaned.
If somebody cares a little bit about an orphaned packages but not enough
to maintain it regularly, he or she does an "QA Upload". Except "did
upload the package once" there is no relationship between the person who
prepared a QA upload and the package.
If you plan to maintain one of the mentioned packages a maintainer
upload (with you set as maintainer in debian/control) instead of a QA
upload is the way to go. If you are unsure if you are able to spend
some hours on the package from time to time to fix bugs and prepare
uploads you could also do a QA upload and set yourself as maintainer the
following upload.
I hope this make the concept how and by whom packages are maintained in
Debian more clear.
You already seem to know that a NMU is a upload of maintained package by
someone who is not the maintainer. NMU's are often required if the
maintainer has currently not the time to prepare a package upload.
> Now, I have continued to revise and restore functionality to
> Htdig and the present status of my queued package can be seen
> below. My work got stalled by the fact that KDE uses Htdig,
> but that I am not prepared to install KDE to test Htdig, as I use
> only the window manager Openbox myself. No desktop!
I don't know htdig, but shouldn't it be possible to test the interface
KDE uses to access htdig instead of KDE with htdig?
> There are still some issues to address in Htdig, but I am
> beginning to ponder how to get this uploaded in the end.
I've heard that htdig is rather complex and difficult to package
properly, if there are only "some issues" to address you seem to have
done very good work :)
> Making it a "QA upload", would it mean that I get the
> opportunity to test my suggested upload in this illustrious
> circle of experts, before an official search for sponsors?
"QA Uploads" hit Debian unstable as maintainer uploads do, besides more
social responsiveness things the technical difference is: they have an
other email address set as maintainer in debian/control.
"QA Upload" and a upload to a non-official place for review are
completely independent things. I hope this has become clear in my
explanations above. You can upload you packages to mentors.debian.net,
see [1] for details. The "illustrious circle of experts" you seek for
reviewing your packages are the people that would also sponsor them,
reviewing it twice would be a waste of time. A proper place to find
sponsors is the list mentors@lists.debian.org or the IRC channel which
should be mentioned somewhere on the mentors.debian.net.
> I would really appreciate that option. If there is another
> standard procedure to get at your accumulated experience,
> please feel free to give me suitable pointers.
There is really no need to review packages by more than one person (at
least not if both reviewers would be able to upload a package, which
includes all Debian developers). It is also perfectly ok if your first
prepared packages have some minor issues that you need to fix before
a sponsor would review it again to finally upload it. According to your
changelog you did fix some lintian warnings, which is a good, many
sponsors require packages to be free of lintian warnings (although, if
you can argue that a specific issue is a lot of work to fix properly and
you would like to address it in your next upload this should also be
ok).
The proper list for your questions is the above mentioned
mentors@lists.debian.org, you should ask further question there. It is
the right list for sponsor requests, general questions about packaging
and specific question about the packages you are preparing. If anything
is still unclear you can also ask me per mail to point you into the
right direction, debian-qa@lists.debian.org is not meant to discuss such
things.
You might be interested in reading the Debian Developers Reference [2].
Regards
Carsten
[1] http://mentors.debian.net/cgi-bin/maintainer-intro
[2] http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/
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