Brian, I understand your complaints. It bugs me, too, to find software not maintained well. We are volunteers, though, and as you realize, it takes a lot of time to do this, and so it happens, on occasion that someone just can't keep up. I don't think it's really fair of people to tell you "hey, see if you can do it better", as you may not have the free time to work on something, let alone jump through the beaurocratic hoops that Debian places in the way of people who want to help. If you don't have the time, you'll probably end up not maintaining it well either;-)
As was stated elsewhere, the best way you can make a meaningful contribution is to file bugs that are "higher level" than "normal", in order to draw attention to broken packages. Even this will take you some time to do properly, as you should read through the existing reports in order to avoid duplicates. However, it's a very valuable service. I know I appreciate finding that someone has already reported a problem, and by doing so, possibly blocking buggy software from going into 'testing' or being released. Thanks for your time, and happy Debian'ing, -- David N. Welton Consulting: http://www.dedasys.com/ Free Software: http://people.debian.org/~davidw/ Apache Tcl: http://tcl.apache.org/ Personal: http://www.efn.org/~davidw/
