On Mon, Jul 28, 2003 at 11:04:34PM +0200, Marcin Orlowski wrote: > all doing your Debian work in own spare time, but doesn't this ring a bell > that there is something in the whole procedure that simply does not work?
OK, please suggest a better way. Criteria to be fulfilled are: 1) Nobody should be arbitrarily assigned work; and 2) Nobody can sponsor a package they are unable to comprehensively test. I'm sure there are others I can't recall right now. Number 2, especially, is a key requirement. If DDs are uploading packages they haven't tested, they have no idea how good/bad/otherwise the package is. Yes, you can analyse the code for added vulnerabilities (and reading over the diff is something I always do) but unless you give the code a bit of a run, you're potentially uploading complete crap. In the case of software for Palmpilots and whatnot, unless a DD has compatible hardware, they can't test it. (Incidentally, if someone really wants to get pose in, they can donate a Palm to me and I'll happily test and sponsor). > I can fully understand that noone of DD subscribed here may be personally > not interested in non mainstream app like Pose, but since package needs a > mentor no matter how mainstream it is, there should be a better way than > just "good luck" to have one assigned. I have heard many users (not just Please suggest this better way. I can't think of it, short of having a registration webpage (which doesn't work anyway, because people need to go and check it regularly), and you're still going to have testing/interest problems. Non-DDs adopting orphaned packages is even harder, because you need to get DD interest to upload it, but if a DD was interested they would have adopted the package. My suggestion for non-DDs looking to maintain an orphaned package is to correct all the bugs via NMU and pester [EMAIL PROTECTED] to get them uploaded. They're the only people (pretty much by definition) that are interested in packages they're not interested in, as it were. Testing is still going to be a problem, however, for odd-hardware packages. > www.apt-get.org counts over 15000 packages at the moment and is, AFAIK, useless for these purposes. If the interest is getting it into Debian, apt-get.org won't help that. - Matt
