Pre-RFA : lifelines, geneweb and poedit packages
Why here? See at the end of this mail..:-)
I intend to lower my package maintenance activity for etch
development, to be able to concentrate on some tasks I'm probably
better suited for : l10n/i18n, animate the shadow package maintenance
team, help out in D-I devel/testing, dig down in the samba package can
for bugs.....
So, I would like to slowly reduce my activity in maintaining packages
I maintain for a while now:
lifelines: text-based genealogy software
geneweb : Genealogy Software with Web Interface
poedit : cross-platform gettext catalog editor
All these packages are in good shape, all in sarge. The bug log for
each of them has been lowered to the minimum.
I have good contacts with all upstream developers.
In short, all three packages are well suitable to be adopted as first
packages by people in the NM queue, wanting to enter the NM queue, or
very recently blessed DD's..:-)
poedit is likely to be taken over by Luk Claes (waiting for an
answer). It is a C++ program using WxWindows (which may need to talk
with the maintainer of these libs from time to time, to sync
development). It is used by translators to work on PO files, so some
knowledge of gettext may help in its maintenance.
It is probably the package which could the more benefit from
collaborative maintenance.
geneweb is an Ocaml program. Maintaining it does not require any
special Ocaml knowledge as upstream is heavily involved in Ocaml
development and there is a pretty good Ocaml team in Debian to help
out with tricky issues. The maintainer scripts are the most
"complicated" part of this package, which uses debconf to input for
several settings. Magni Onsoien has expressed some interest to take
part of its maintenance. Among these 3 packages, geneweb is probably
the one which has the largest amount of users. Maintaining a non
official sarge backport of new upstream versions as I did during the 3
years of sarge development is also an interesting activity (though not
mandatory, of course). Given that it launches a daemon at startup,
this package is the most exposed to security concerns.
lifelines is probably the simplest package of the three. It is a well
maintained C program with low upstream activity, but good
responsiveness. It does not indeed require much attention...:-)
Before offering these as official RFAs (Request for Adoption), I have
chosen to "pre-offer" them here to give some of the members of the
project (namely women as this is the project goal) an opportunity to
jump in the boat.
In all cases, I will *not* just throw away the packages as soon as
someone has expressed interest. I am ready to help the new maintainer
as widely as possible to give her/him a good knowledge of the
package. Several months of collaborative maintenance are absolutely
possible. More than one maintainer is also welcome. Long-term
sponsoring is also an option.
In short, this can be taken as a kind of mentoring offer....
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