> This doesn't sound too bad to me, _but_ a better report might be to > set up some sort of automatic system that sends out email to all > maintainers at 1 month intervals [or something like that]. If > someone doesn't respond to 2 or 3, then they are marked inactive and > someone, preferable a human, verifies that the maintainer is not > active anymore and orphans all of his/her packages... This would > eliminate the unmaintained problem...
This could be nice... I might even volunteer for setting up something like that - given the authority, of course: orphaning other people's packages must be done responsibly... This email that would be sent would be bug-list (or a subset thereof), right? A simple "Are you alive?" Would be quite annoying... Of course, a bug-list once a month would be annoying to active developers, too. Would it be possible to exclude from getting the email those maintainers who have uploaded a new version during the last, say, 3 months? This, of course, would still unnecessarily burden maintainers of packages which are more or less dead upstream and do not have any (important) bugs... We do not want to annoy maintainers, either... Of course, skipping maintainers of packages with no important bugs could help, too. This would be easy to implement, too. > As for unused packages, it is a very subjective thing :) Something > like iraf might now be used by many but it is still needed by some.. > Removing stuff like this turns Debian into RedHat - no one wants > that. I agree to that, 100%. -- ----------------------------------------------- | Juha Jäykkä, [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/ | -----------------------------------------------