Hi, Adduser is rapidly nearing its 10th birthday and has been maintained by Roland Bauerschmidt since 2000. In 2004, I joined the adduser team, and have done most of the work in adduser in the last year.
The code in adduser is old, non-modular, "spaghetti-like", in two words: Needs rewriting. The main cause is that adduser relies on shadow and password do to the real work and thus interfaces badly with more modern methods of user management like NIS and LDAP which are rapidly increasing in their importance. For a more closer roundup of missing features, take a look into adduser's BTS entry. Roland is currently very busy with his non-Debian life and it is unclear whether he will have time to spend on adduser in the future. Regarding me, I will take the time to fix urgent bugs in adduser, but I won't implement any new features, and I surely won't participate in the rewrite of adduser which has been started multiple times, with its most prominent result being adduser-ng in the archive. However, the adduser-ng packages haven't seen maintainer action in a quite long time and I'm inclined to call adduser-ng abandoned. This e-mail is going out to solicit co-maintainers for the adduser package. My ideal candidate: - Is willing to spend time not only on improving the old adduser code base, but also in the rewrite which _must_ come sooner or later to improve interaction with different user database backends - Knows about NIS, LDAP and other user database backends - Is familiar with translation infrastructure for debconf templates, man pages and program texts - Knows how to interface with other maintainers (shadow, ldap, nis) and translators - Will first write a test suite for the package before touching the actual code adduser is a very important package for Debian, and it's a shame that it doesn't get the attention it needs. I am afraid that only the most important bug fixes will be done for the package until somebody volunteers to put more manpower into it. New members of the adduser team do not need to be full DDs, I can sponsor the packages. People interested, please subscribe to the adduser-devel mailing list (http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/adduser-devel), say hello, take a look at the bugs open in the BTS, and start submitting patches. I will eventually hand out commit privileges to the project svn to people who have successfully submitted patches. Commit privileges to the project svn will be handed out immediately if somebody comes up with actually new code for the rewrite. Thanks for helping! Greetings Marc -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | lose things." Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834 Nordisch by Nature | How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 621 72739835 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]