> - non-free archives? The thing that would make me happiest would be for everything in non-free to be obsoleted by some better piece of free software. Until / unless that happens, my take on this from a practical standpoint is that we should leave non-free alone.
In passing, let me mention the 'vrms' package, which I dreamed up and Bill Geddes wrote after an email exchange with RMS about non-free. While it doesn't directly relate to where we host non-free (and has some bugs that I think Stephen Moraco is addressing), it can be a useful tool for those of us who care what dependencies we might have on non-free software. > - sluggish new maintainer process? As a general principle, I want there to be *some* inertia in both the new maintainer and MIA maintainer processes. It became quickly obvious to me while serving as an AM shortly after we restarted the NM process that the DM is the rate limiter on how quickly new applicants complete the process. It's not clear to me that we have a big problem, but if elected, I will review our DM's workload with him, and discuss ways of making sure the other jobs he does for Debian don't interfere with timely processing of applicants. > - Maintainers who are MIA The processes by which we manage maintainership clearly need to continue to evolve. I joined Debian on the strength of one piece of introductory email from Bruce Perens to Ian Murdock, at a time when we didn't even sign uploads. While we've come a long way since then, we are not yet explicitly managing the complete "lifecycle" of a maintainer in our organization. There are a number of maintainer responsiveness issues that I think we might address, of which this is arguably the most detrimental. It's important to remind ourselves that Debian is a volunteer organization, and interact with each other accordingly. However, anyone who accepts maintainership of a package is making some currently-unarticulated commitments to the rest of our community that shouldn't be abandoned lightly. Setting up a process to identify, contact, and take action to recover from MIA maintainers makes complete sense to me. Bdale