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Re: How should we deal with bad maintainers?



Hi,

On 30/03/14 at 19:34 +0100, Neil McGovern wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 10:21:06AM +0100, Gergely Nagy wrote:
> > Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> > 
> > > assume that a package maintainer is active but is doing a bad job
> > > regarding our standards (things like ignoring problems in stable, breaking
> > > backwards compatibility for no good reason, not packaging new upstream
> > > versions in unstable, etc) and is not really cooperative (closing bugs
> > > hastily, not responding to help offers).
> > >
> > > What shall we do in those situations?
> > >
> > > Best case, I'm very motivated and I hijack the package but assume that I'm
> > > just interested in having a working package because it's a dependency of a
> > > package that I use but that I don't care enough to take it over. What are
> > > my options?
> > 
> > On a similar topic, a couple of years ago, there was an effort to set up
> > a salvaging process. Not quite for the situation Raphael describes, but
> > somewhat related. My question to both candidates would be: what's your
> > opinion on salvaging packages? If favourable, what do you think, could
> > move it forward?
> > 
> 
> I'm certainly keen to ensure the salvaging work goes ahead - to move it
> forward though I think it needs a bit of work done on dev-ref to
> formalise it, and have it proposed. We should make sure we're not
> duplicating the work of the MIA team.

(Agreed)

> For maintainers who are active, and there's a technical disagreement
> about how a package is maintained, then the tech-ctte is the correct
> place to take the issue.

Well, I think that the DPL has a role to play here, too, by using
mediation in order to restore dialogue, have each party see the issue
with the other party's point of view, etc. That's something I have been
involved with on at least two occasions during my term.

Lucas

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