Joey asked how many sponsored people there are at the moment and since I didn't know I asked Colin for an estimate. Colin did a great job, and came up with a list of 191 people. While I (and he) thought this was a high number, it's actually accurate (take or give a few). Now I wouldn't be surprised if some of those 191 people weren't active anymore... I just wanted to mention this here to show that this is actually a serious issue. While I don't have time right now, I will go through this list of people at some point to find inactive people and orphan their packages.
In the meantime, I have added the following to the README in klecker:/org/qa.debian.org/mia: Sponsored people who are inactive --------------------------------- A major problem are sponsored people are are inactive. They are even harder to pin down than inactive developers since no echelon information is not available about them, their contact details are not available on db.debian.org, etc. One strategy which might be useful to find out about their current status is to contact the developer who has actually uploaded the package. After all, they are responsible for the upload and should know what happened to the person they sponsored. Furthermore, one can check http://nm.debian.org and see the status of the person in the NM process. The site also lists the Application Manager of the applicant and he might have more information. One problem is that there is no list of sponsored people. Colin Watson has used the following scripts as a starting point to find sponsored people: grep-available -rFMaintainer -nsMaintainer . > maintainers (gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring ./debian-keyring.gpg --list-keys; \ gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring ./debian-keyring.pgp --list-keys) \ | grep -v '^\[.*\]$' | grep . | sort -u > keyring-maintainers perl -e 'open K, "keyring-maintainers"; while (<K>) { $k{$_} = 1; } close K; open M, "maintainers"; while (<M>) { print unless $k{$_}; } close M;' > sponsored-maintainers However, this is only an approximation. It's still necessary to go through the file by hand and remove the ones who use different e-mail addresses from the ones in their GPG keys. Thus, most of the work is weeding through the sponsored-maintainers file and comparing it more intelligently to keyring-maintainers. Once a current listing of sponsored people has been made with this method, one can start checking the status of all sponsored people against http://nm.debian.org/ and see who's left, or which applicants who are "on hold" in the NM process have packages in the archive. -- Martin Michlmayr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
