Package: getmail6 Version: 6.14-1 Hi,
I'm the original author of getmail, which was included in the Debian repositories for a long time (until you dropped most packages depending on Python 2). getmail6 is a fork of getmail. I'm fine with forking; I chose the GPLv2 for a reason. However, the getmail6 package contains numerous bugs that are not present in getmail (they keep coming up, and I have reasons to believe this will continue to be the case for a significant time), and this is imposing a significant support burden on me. It also is harming the reputation of getmail, which has a long (23 years) history of very, very few bugs. No matter what the getmail6 documentation says, when users hit a problem with getmail6, they just web-search "getmail" and end up reporting it to my getmail users' mailing list, or directly to my personal email. And they generally do not mention the version number they're using. It takes signficant time and work to actually get to the point where I can point out that they're using getmail6 and not getmail, and that the bug they've hit is not present in getmail. So: fork is fine. Imposing a large support burden on the original project is not. I would appreciate it if this package/project was renamed to something that does not contain the word "getmail" or anything confusingly similar. I don't particularly care what - just as long as the package/project does not contain "getmail", which will significantly reduce the likelihood of users of that project from contacting me for support. I have requested this of the getmail6 author but have not had a positive response from him yet. Perhaps Sudip Mukherjee, the Debian package maintainer, can either help persuade the author of that package to change its name, or can rename the Debian package if not. Thank you, Charles -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Charles Cazabon <charlesc-getm...@pyropus.ca> Software, consulting, and services available at http://pyropus.ca/ ------------------------------------------------------------------
