Hi, Le Sun, Dec 30, 2001 at 06:50:16PM +0100, Bas Zoetekouw écrivait: > It's quite easy to say that you can find dozens of such packages. Please > be specific, and post the name of those packages/maintainers (take it to > -private, if you want) but I honestly don't believe that there are many > badly maintained recent packages.
I didn't say "recent". The time between the ITP and when they are suffering from lack of maintenance can be more than a year ... > > backup maintainers, they could have noticed that the package is no more well > > maintained and they could take it over or help the main maintainer > > if he didn't totally disappear. > > They can do that now, too. They can do, as you can continually scan the BTS ... but the fact is that scanning the BTS is not meant to be done daily just to be sure that a package is maintainer. Beeing a backup maintainer, you'd get the BTS mails directly and you can follow the package in real time and detect problems without loosing much time by scanning regularly the BTS. > And if they don't notice that the package is > badly mainatined, then what is the problem? There are many packages that > haven't been updated in ages, but work perfectly. And what do you want to prove with that ? Of course, it's fine if a package works well, but having an active maintainer is always useful just to package new versions, just to be sure there's someone when something happens. > OK, but giving all packages multiple maintainers I find a bit far > fetched a solution. It's not a requirement, it's something we should encourage because it's a good thing for us. You may find the solution far fetched but it's the only viable solution in the long term ... any other methods that concentrate on detecting problems after they come up is bad, we should try to avoid the problems in the first place... Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog -+- http://strasbourg.linuxfr.org/~raphael/ Le bouche à oreille du Net : http://www.beetell.com Naviguer sans se fatiguer à chercher : http://www.deenoo.com Formation Linux et logiciel libre : http://www.logidee.com
