Russ Allbery wrote: > Whenever this topic comes up on debian-devel, the conversation seems to > focus on the small minority of maintainers who don't respond to bugs, are > still active on their packages, resist any attempt at co-maintainership, > and can't be dealt with through the MIA process.
Yes, these are the most frustrating cases. > Such people, to the > extent that they exist, are frustrating; they're also such a small > minority of the problem that if they were all we had to worry about, > Debian would be in awesome shape. > [...] > If you run into a maintainer who doesn't want your help, move on and try > another maintainer. It might not be so simple. Suppose I have taken it upon myself to push change Foo through Debian. The Foo project requires cooperation from several DDs and at the beginning I can't tell whether I will get that cooperation from all of them. After having devoted many hours to project Foo and after the passage of some months I find that progress is blocked by needed changes to package P. I write to the maintainer of P but get no reply. After repeating this a few times I (finally!) get a message from the P maintainer... about his having more important things to do than deal with my patch. Time goes by and the patch is never spoken of again. Of course I move on and do something else. But I have wasted a lot of time, Foo never gets done, and I have learned not to undertake any more projects like Foo in the future. Not within Debian, anyway. Purely hypothetical case, but it could happen. -- Thomas Hood -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
