I'm not sure if I should be replying with my MIT/Debathena hat or my Debian hat or my "inherited Zephyr upstream team maintenance after Karl passed away" hat ... so I guess this message is all 3, and I've chosen my MIT From: address arbitrarily.
After Karl passed away, Zephyr was transitioned to a Github "team" at https://github.com/zephyr-im/zephyr. I'm one of the folks in that organization, so we're upstream. This is a git repository that superseded Karl's old subversion repository, with a conversion that Karl himself performed, IIRC. Karl had been working on a Zephyr 3.1 release before he passed. Unfortunately, there was some sort of memory corruption bug we couldn't trace, that only appeared on a "heavily used" zephyrd such as the MIT zephyr ATHENA.MIT.EDU realm. I still have on my TODO list to one day get around to fixing it, but no amount of ASAN builds showed anything wrong. There is a debian/ directory in this repository, but as Sam identified in earlier messages, I do believe it has diverged from what's in Debian upstream. I don't recall how much, but I suppose it is fixable, from past memory. To that end, if we need a new Maintainer, I (as [email protected]) am happy to do it -- although having it be team-maintained with the other DDs and DMs who are knowledgeable would be better. Zephyr traffic has reduced in the recent years, but MIT does still run Zephyr, and does still use the upstream packages for clients, so I think we should include it for now. As to GitHub vs Salsa: I recognize that Salsa is the preferred Debian way to do it, but we'd really need to stop carrying a debian/ directory in upstream if we want to go to Salsa. Karl being upstream and also a DD led to it being included, and of course, later led to the divergence. Sincerely, -Alex On Tue, Sep 9, 2025 at 8:50 AM Sam Hartman <[email protected]> wrote: > > >>>>> "Andreas" == Andreas Tille <[email protected]> writes: > > Andreas> Hi Sam, I'd offer to fix RC bugs and do a QA upload while > Andreas> the packaging can be maintained on Salsa in Debian/ team. > > As the closest thing to a maintainer, I will not stand in your way; if > you want to do that, go for it with no delays. > I'd ask you to consider whether that's really an efficient use of your > time though if we're just going to drop Zephyr. > > Zephyr has been effectively unmaintained upstream since Karl's death, > and I think that while the servers probably still run at MIT and a few > other places, Zephyr traffic has died off significantly. > > Unless I'm wrong and someone steps forward and says they want to invest > time, your effort might be better spent removing Zephyr as a dependency.
