Package: tech-ctte Severity: normal Hello!
Over the past year I've followed a bit of the discussion on the technical committee mailing list and it seems like people on the committee are much more willing to turn to it for advice then other people. Maybe I should not be so shy and try to ask for your guidance more often myself? Lets try it... According to Debian constitution chapter 6.1 ยง3 I'm seeking your advice on how to best handle the util-linux situation. In a very brief background statement, my impression is that the current util-linux maintenance leaves alot to be desired. Bugs are not being dealt with, patches are ignored, upstream releases are not incorporated. I've tried both giving the current maintainers time (as the little public communication that exists has included repeated promises that work is being done on the package), and more recently to actively help out and offer a solution (see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=678446#62 and the followup). Communications have not been very successful as it seems like current maintainers do not like to communicate publicly. The little information I have is from what has been leaked from private discussions. The advice I've received from other Debian Developers is that I should not expect any replies from current maintainers and general support for just going ahead and uploading an updated version of the package without maintainer concent. (If you're interested in my work on the package itself see http://people.debian.org/~ah/util-linux-2.24/ where I've aimed for creating an updated and more easily maintainable package which functionality wise is "on par" with current package -- paving the way for actually fixing reported packaging bugs while being able to easily update to new upstream releases when they appear.) Basically, informed users are frustrated that they do not get to enjoy the bugfixes and new features of upstream releases and Debian Developers working on related packages are frustrated that they can not get even the most trivial integration fixes included in the util-linux package. I've recently done some basic bug triaging and (amond other things) added the "fixed-upstream" tag to more bugs which I could easily identified as being resolved by newer upstream releases. I think the list of bugs speaks pretty much for itself that having a newer upstream release in debian would be a welcome improvement: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=util-linux;include=tags:fixed-upstream Apart from that, the package is basically always release critically buggy and since the last maintainer upload (over 2 years ago) there has been 8 NMUs. The current situation is that there are still 3 open RC-bugs. Of these 1 would be resolved by a newer upstream release, the other 2 are pure packaging bugs which upstream can not do anything about but an active maintainer should be able to deal with quickly. Hopefully my bug triaging has been helpful and just identifying which bugs can be closed with a new upstream release in the archive should save someone alot of time, but I'd like to go further and actually see bugs *fixed*. I hope I've shown that I'm willing and capable to do the work myself, but I'm unsure on how to best proceed given that my help is not accepted in addition to Debians strong ownership principles. So what is your advice? How do I best proceed? If someone has secret back channels to maintainers, could you please use them to see if we can find a way forward? Should I continue to respect the wishes of the people listed as maintainer/uploaders of the package despite they haven't produced any improvements in over 2 years time and the package still needs attention to be in a shape acceptable for release? Should I give up on trying to integrate my improvements and instead continue to maintain my package outside of the archive and ask people to use my version instead of the official package? Regards, Andreas Henriksson PS. While forwarding a few patches upstream I was happy to see we already have hurd porters working actively with upstream on their new releases! :) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
