Team maintainance of TeX packages (was: Bug#355084: lmodern: does not work anymore)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:

>> thinking about it, but I think that adding the packaging for it to the 
>> TeX Strike Force would be best, since team maintainance is the way to 
>> go, AFAICS).
>
> Well, for single packages I don't think this is necessary. Team
> Maintainance is not obligatory, and we use it only for those packages
> which are big (tetex and texlive). So do like you want. 

I think that package quality will generally be better if they are
team-maintained.  On the other hand, adding a package to the TeX Task
Force's list also adds work to the member, even if it's just to set some
threads to ignore.

Therefore I don't think that we should generally aim to add many TeX
add-on packages to our team-maintained packages list.  It might make
sense, though, to have one example of each type ("simple LaTeX package",
"font package", ...) as a reference implementation.  

But unless some very important package (like e.g. beamer) gets (and
stays for a while) orphaned and falls into our hands, I'd say we should
only take a package if there is a maintainer (Rogério in this case) who
continues to be the primary responsible person (and organize their own
sponsor, if needed), and the package is just team-maintained in the
sense that we help updating it to the newest "state-of-the-art".

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)