Re: Packaging Policy.
Corey Popelier <pancreas@dingoblue.net.au> wrote:
>My issue is this, 5.5.3 is actually about 5 or 6 versions behind the
>times. It was from about Sept last year if I recall. Now I don't know what
>the status of the maintainer of this package is, but what are the Debian
>policy/ethical issues involved if I suddenly piped up and said I had
>[unofficial?] packages available for this?
For an unofficial package, and one which isn't being well-maintained in
Debian, I think it's perfectly reasonable to make available newer or
better versions, as long as you feed the improvements back up the chain
in case the Debian maintainer ever wakes up. In the case of a newer
upstream version, of course, that's really already been done.
The normal bounds of politeness apply, of course; I wouldn't trumpet my
unofficial package around as the One True Package, and it would take
quite a lot for me to decide to fork a package that was being actively
maintained. Mind you, forking is an established tradition in free
software; it wouldn't be the first time that somebody had decided to
fork a project that seemed to be going nowhere or in a direction they
didn't like (see gcc, the BSDs, dpkg, and even upstream fetchmail
itself).
Debian is a sufficiently close-knit project that it's considered good to
keep forking to a minimum to stop things getting silly, and taking over
packages in the archive itself is something to take very seriously (see
the Developer's Reference, section 9.5). But making things better for
other people is a good thing, and since your intentions are obviously
good a little unobtrusive repackaging wouldn't hurt anybody.
>Would anyone hunt me down with a sizable knife if I ever [unofficially]
>packaged something that appeared to be a tad outdated? :)
I doubt it. The people being bitten by the same bug would probably thank
you. :) If the maintainer appears totally unresponsive for several
months, you could ask on debian-devel for somebody to adopt the package,
or become a developer and do so yourself.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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