On Wednesday, April 18, 2012 11:19:39, Russ Allbery wrote: <snipping to here because I believe the below stands well on its own> ... > When we're talking about packaging significant new upstream releases, I > think NMUs are dodging the problem in a somewhat unuseful way, and we > really need to sort out the maintenance of the package going forward > instead. > > Personally (and, for that matter, as a Technical Committee member), I'm > going to generally lean towards letting the person with time do the > package maintenance work rather than the person with no time, even if the > standards and practices that the person with no time would like to work > within are admirable and strong. It feels to me like a fairly fundamental > rule of free software that, modulo cases where there's a serious technical > disagreement that could lead to software not working or doing nasty > things, that people who don't have time to do work don't get to block > people who do have time to do work. I try to apply that to myself as > well; if I don't have time to do it "right," then at some point I no > longer really have a right to tell other people how to do it and require > that they do it that way.
I think the above is reasonable and fits the Debian "do-acracy" methodology. At the same time, I also understand that this is a tough call to make. Removing the current maintainer if they're not totally MIA may not seem right -- it may feel "heavy-handed". Perhaps in these cases, adding an additional maintainer that is currently working on the package(s) and notifiying the current maintainer(s) that this has been done seems reasonable. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle chris.kna...@coredump.us GPG Key: 4096R/0x1E759A726A9FDD74
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