On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 06:56:04PM -0500, Chris Knadle wrote: > I know; I agree with you and I think the text is a bit misleading -- by > stating that you shouldn't change the packaging style it seems to indicate > that NMUs are supposed to be minimalistic, but a situation in which the > maintainer of a package disappears for an extended period is exactly a > situation in which a minimalistic change approach won't work.
Right. So just take over the package and do normal uploads? By uploading normal changes as NMU this is what you effectively do anyways. > > > For cases where the maintainer is unresponsive for an extended period, I'd > > > recommend requesting a new version via a 'wishlist' bug, then releasing a > > > new version as a -0.1 NMU. Others (myself included) have done this > > > successfully. > > > > I opened the wishlist bug entry for that (#723781) in September and > > agree, that uploading a -0.1 NMU would solve the issue of the new > > upstream version. > > When I last did this in #728545 for mumble, the situation was rather serious > because it had been removed from jessie due to package dependency issues and > needed to get fixed ASAP. So I opened a wishlist bug, then waited about a > week, then uploaded a package for review to mentors.debian.net and started > hunting for a DD sponsor. > > I contacted the prior maintainer, who examined the package and decided it was > good enough and uploaded it to the DELAYED/5 queue. Then I wrote to the bug > to notify the maintainer in case he needed more time to respond and review > the > package if needed. > > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=728545 > > I didn't change the packaging style in doing this, but just about everything > else did. ;-) Obviously I was willing to support the package if there were > problems brought by my sponsored upload, and as long as you keep this in mind > as well then I think this practice should work. I think its okay for stunnel to simply follow the steps described in the MIA section of the developers reference [0]. > > OTOH having an active maintainer is more helpful than lots of NMUs > > IMHO. Thus it makes more sense to take over packages or add at least > > add a Co-Maintianer for this. > > Right, exactly. But to start with you may not want to do that; the > maintainer > normally gives approval for adding a co-maintainer. After you've done > several > NMU uploads and tried to contact the maintainer via the MIA team, then after > that I think the next logical step I think is to add one's self onto the list > of Uploaders... basically only because I know of no better option rather than > that being "the right thing to do". Because it's not reasonable to be > expected to do minimalistic changes for long periods of time. The MIA team can orphan packages if the maintainer is MIA, see [0]. Having a ghost-maintainer doing NMUs while the maintainer is MIA feels wrong to me. > So NMUs can solve things in the short-term, but between NMUs and "where to go > from there" is still a limbo I haven't yet gotten good answers for. There's > been a lot of debate on [debian-devel] about this and NMUs are generally one > of the answers, but there are situations that don't quite fit any standard > situation. Like for instance a maintainer might be MIA but ignoring one > particular package for a long period of time, thus the MIA team can't say > that > the maintainer is really MIA, yet the package isn't getting maintenance, and > thus no next logical step to take. That's why I'm suggesting that adding > one's self to Uploaders after some number of NMUs seems to make sense. :-/ > Again not necessarily right, just "the least worst" next step I can think of. If the maintainer is still working on some packages he should be contactable. Thus one can simply ask the maintainer if he/she wants to give the package to another maintainer or get a co-maintainer. [0] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/beyond-pkging.html#mia-qa -- Sebastian
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