Raphael Hertzog wrote: > On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: >> What we need to do is: >> 1) improve our ways to detect 'crap', to remove those packages from the >> archive (it doesn't make sense to keep them in unstable). We need >> safeguards to make mistakes less frequent. >> 2) improve awareness of orphaned packages. During the QA BOF, the idea of >> a script taking as input a list of packages (the list of locally >> installed packages on a DD's system, for example), and outputting the >> list of "problems" (RC bugs, O/RFA bugs) was raised. There was >> opposition to providing this as something enabled by default in >> devscripts, but it would still make sense to provide such a script. > > I see many people interested in removing packages, I would like people > interested in finding maintainers for orphaned packages. It's a task > that can be done by everybody (no need to be DD/DM) and we should try to > recruit some volunteers for this.
Sure, and one of the ways to do it is by increasing the visibility of the WNPP status. A couple of weeks or so I sent an email to -qa about using user categories to make the wnpp bugs page look nicer, no response so far. I in no way pretend to say that using user categories is a solution or that it would really help, because I can't tell for sure, I can only speculate. > > As such I would like that we add a new step in the removal process that > would be "Try to get in touch with the upstream community informing them > on the need of a new maintainer" (exactly like we try to get in touch with > MIA DD before orphaning packages, we should get in touch with upstream > before removing stuff from Debian). We could have a sample mail > for this explaining how to adopt the package, how to find sponsors for the > start, how to use the PTS to follow the activity of the source package, > etc. Good idea. > > We could use the BTS forwarded field to store the fact that someone took > care of contacting upstream. We point volunteers to a specific BTS urls > that list all "O:" bugs that are not yet forwarded. > That can currently be done thanks to the automated user tagging. Use 'o' as the w...@packages.debian.org user tag to select the orphaned packages. Cheers, -- Raphael Geissert - Debian Maintainer www.debian.org - get.debian.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-release-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
