reassign 671364 tech-ctte retitle 671364 Please decide on dma maintenance affects 671364 dma thanks
Dear Technical Committee, by Debian Constitution §§6.1.3 - 6.1.5 we ask you on advice and possibly to overrule a maintainer in case of the maintenance for the dma package. Our rationale follows: * The package in Debian is outdated and has a recent history of release critical bugs (#697871, #688682). None of these were fixed by the maintainer, and the maintainer generally seems absent while not completely unreachable. Therefore there is no reason to assume, the package was orphaned. As a result, the package missed the Wheezy release. * The Debian maintainer de-facto forked the package by introducing heavy weight patches diverging from upstream making it hard and complicated to keep in track with upstream's releases. We suppose this is also known to the dma maintainer in Debian, as he points to his private home page [1] in the control file of the package, instead of the official one [2]. This confuses users and frustrates upstream, as he is getting bug reports for tools and behavior which are specific to Debian. Upstream has, on his own, merged parts of the patches he thought would benefit dma, while stating that the remaining ones would, in his eyes, add too much complexity. According to him, upsteam also tried several times to reach Peter to resolve the situation, just as did Arno, without getting any reaction beyond promises so far. We do not intend to judge about the quality of the work of the "fork", but we cannot address issues of dma within Debian, without conflicting with the maintainer's jurisdictions as we cannot and do not intend to effectively become upstream for the "Debian dma" package. * As a side note, dma is seen by some people as a valid alternative[3] to replace exim in the default installation. This might require a mutually beneficial effort to both, Debian and upstream to make the package a suitable candidate. Therefore, we ask the Technical Committee to resolve the situation on the dma maintenance in Debian. We suggest to overrule the maintainer and acknowledge he effectively forked dma, and give maintenance to whomever else the TC considers best suited for the purpose of re-introducing the pristine dma code base. Moreover, we suggest to rename the "Debian dma" package when the current maintainer feels necessary and upload it again under a different name. Laurent Bigonville and Arno Töll [1] http://devel.ringlet.net/mail/dma/ [2] https://github.com/corecode/dma [3] http://wiki.debian.org/Debate/DefaultMTA/DMA -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
