Hi, As an up-up-stream maintainer for GNU Classpath, which is used by kaffe and as a kaffe developer I must say that I find some emails about maintaining the kaffe package for Debian highly unfair to Arnaud. Arnaud does all the work on kaffe and communicates with lots of other package maintainers and upstream developers about what the best course of action is to get a great kaffe platform in Debian. Ean gives the impression that people like Arnaud don't try to communicate with him. But the fact is that Ean doesn't seem to communicate at all. Except now to claim that he is still the "official" Debian maintainer and that everything should be cleared with him. Ean knows damn well that he never replies to any of the requests people send him or look at any of the bugs filed against the kaffe package.
People on the debian-java list were really happy when Ean accepted the fact that he was essentially not the maintainer anymore and let Arnaud (and others) be co-maintainers. They respected his request to be the maintainer in name since this was his last official debian package. And they were really happy with Ean his suggestion of setting up a kaffe-strike force. But since then Ean hasn't worked together with this strike-force at all. Arnaud was the person going through all the bugs filed against kaffe. Checking with upstream whether or not they knew about it and helping fix issues for users. Arnaud was the person going through all the Debian specific patches with the upstream developers to see whether or not they were still needed or whether they could be integrated upstream. Arnaud was the person to work together with other package maintainers to setup http://java.debian.net/. Arnaud gave a presentation together with the main kaffe developer at FOSDEM to talk about issues packaging kaffe and other packages depending on kaffe. Arnaud discussed what to do about the fact that kaffe has been broken for a couple of architectures for a long time. On the kaffe mailinglist he posted the Debian buildd logs to help correct errors. And he was the person that asked upstream how they wanted the kaffe package in Debian to be handled to finally get it into testing. It feels like Ean is hiding behind some Debian policy to keep people with more enthusiasm and time from maintaining the package. They have asked Ean time and again to join them in their efforts, to communicate with them on packaging issues (through personal emails from Arnaud, emails on the debian mailinglists, filing and documenting issues in the bugdatabase, etc), but he seems to ignore all the hard work they do. I would advice Ean and Arnaud to call each other on the phone one of these days to talk it out. Or maybe that some other less involved Debian developer discuss the situation (off-list) with them to see what the most appropriate action with respect to maintaining kaffe for Debian is. Ean his idea about having a kaffe-strike force was good. But all people will have to communicate and participate in the strike force for it to work. Cheers, Mark
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