Melvin Vermeeren:
Hi, I am the current maintainer of Breathe upstream[1] and also a Debian user since a few years after having switched distribution. If I possible I would like to also (help?) maintain Breathe in Debian in some way. Currently I'm not an official Debian maintainer, though I do have a around a year experience by now in maintaining an unofficial Debian repository[2], mainly for additional backports. Said repo is currently undergoing some rework to improve correctness and automation. On Salsa[3] I open up MRs for buster bugfixes if I find anything cumbersome as I'm used to the GitLab workflow. [1] https://github.com/michaeljones/breathe [2] https://mel.vin/debian/ [3] https://salsa.debian.org/vermeeren In some form of sponsorship or helping out possible? I could for example do some maintaining in a fork on Salsa and submit MRs to the real Salsa repo for a final check by someone with proper maintainer permissions. It has been a while since I read the specifics of sponsorship etc so I am not entirely sure what the options are. Had a very nice exchange of emails with Chris Knadle, the maintainer of Mumble, quite a while ago. Adding in the CC both for general interest and perhaps for some ideas. Looking forward to hearing what can be done! Thanks,
Hello Melvin.I looked up the bug CCed in the email and see that the Breathe package was marked as Orphaned via the BTS; however the package still has a listed maintainer instead of Debian QA Group <packages@qa.debian.org>, meaning the full orphaning of the package hasn't been completed yet. More explanation here:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#orphaning-a-packageAt the moment all this means is that the Breathe package in Debian will have no official maintainer -- it doesn't necessarily mean that the package will be removed from the archive soon. Package removals happen sometimes for packages that go out of maintenance for an extended period, but this package was only _just_ been (partially) orphaned, so as far as I know, the situation is not "alarming". Breathe has now joined 1175 other packages that have been orphaned -- you can see a list of them here, many of which have been orphaned for several years:
https://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/orphanedIn terms of the Breathe package itself, I'm unfamiliar with it... and to date I've never used Doxygen or Sphinx, I'm not (yet) familiar with reStructuredText, and at the moment I'm only doing sporadic Python3 programming. Debian Developers are encouraged to be familiar with the packages that they upload or in sponsoring for uploads in case there are bugs in the package that require familiarity to fix. I'm probably not the right maintainer to sponsor uploads directly, but I /am/ interested in helping guide you through the process of getting you what you need to take care of the package. I'd likely be comfortable helping do NMUs (non-maintainer uploads) for targeted bug fixes, and I would also be comfortable helping with preparing and/or reviewing package uploads to mentors.debian.net to help get a sponsor for uploads.
https://mentors.debian.net/sponsors/And assuming you'd like to take over for maintenance of the breathe Debian package yourself and have sponsored uploads, the next step for that would be to file an "ITA" (Intent To Adopt) bug, I believe. It seems you've got some Debian package development experience already, so this seems quite fitting. There's some additional explanation of the "ITA:" bug subject here:
https://wiki.debian.org/how-can-i-helpStrangely I don't see the "ITA:" bug explained in the Debian Developer's Reference guide under "Adopting a package", which I would like to see updated for that.
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#adopting-a-package mel.vin Debian repo =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=I had a quick look at your Debian repository at the [2] link from your email and wonder how the package list is being updated -- if the package list being automatically generated I would be interested in knowing how to do that. ;-)
The other thing I noticed in the list of packages is that there's a mumble backport package. The maintainer for the Mumble backport in Debian hasn't done an upload for 2 years, so if you'd be interested in seeing your backport uploaded to Debian backports directly, that would be something I'd be interested in talking about.
Thanks and talk to you soon. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle Chris.Knadle@coredump.us
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