Hi Moshe
thank you for your work on the wordplay package.
Am Sat, Mar 07, 2026 at 02:02:04PM +0100 schrieb Alexandre Detiste:
> Hi Moshe,
>
> From my point of view - 10 years ago - I absolutely disliked Alioth,
> mentors.d.n, having to file a RFS, having to beg on IRC
> that someone does the upload; having to keep IRC
> open for hours to hope for an answer.
>
> But still I did sponsored your package the way you like.
Seems I missed the mail about sponsoring. I just received the
message here in this bug report where you wrote
> I believe the package would be a great addition to the Games team, and I
> took the liberty to create the Salsa repository here[2].
I will take this under advisement.
> And I would gladly do it again if you ask again.
I admit I would have requested several changes before sponsoring the
package. I think sponsoring includes teaching modern ways to maintain
packages inside Debian. For instance I require my Sponsees to maintain
their packages in some team on Salsa where we both have commit
permissions. This ensures we can cooperate easily in case some changes
might be needed.
In case of the current upload I would have requested several changes.
1. The Debian Games team policy[1] says:
a) Set the Maintainer field to "Debian Games Team
<[email protected]>"
and add yourself to the Uploaders field.
b) The package must be in a Git repository as part of the Games
Team on Salsa, and must contain at least a debian/ directory.
2. The repository you added as Vcs fileds do not work as you can
see on tracker page[3]:
Failed to analyze the VCS repository. Please troubleshoot and fix the
issue.
Moreover I was surprised to see that the changes already prepared in
the Games team repository were not used. Re-implementing similar
changes independently while ignoring existing commits and changelog
entries makes collaboration harder and bypasses the work that had
already been done as part of the salvage effort.
I assume this was not intentional, but it would be good if we could
coordinate such work in the future. Debian development works best when
we build on each other's work instead of duplicating it.
> But still I find it more effective when all the games
> are in the Games team on Salsa.
>
> I can sponsor fheroes2 5 times in a row
> without making the maintainer going to
> so many baroque hooks;
> I just notice a new release is there,
> I check the diff and upload it.
>
> But I welcome every contribution.
>
> All that said, the leftover unused "wordplay" repos on Salsa
> should be removed someday.
I agree that having packages maintained inside the Games team on Salsa
is the most effective setup. This was exactly my motivation when I
created the repository there while working on the salvage.
Instead of removing the repository I would strongly prefer migrating the
package properly to the Games team and continuing the work there. For
me this is an important aspect of the salvage effort: moving packages
that were previously maintained in a more isolated way into a team
maintenance model where collaboration becomes easier.
Therefore my preference would be to take the currently used repository,
import or merge it into the Games team repository on Salsa, and make the
package follow the team policy consistently.
> Greetings and thanks again
Greetings and thanks from me as well
Andreas.
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/Games/Policy
[3] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/wordplay
--
https://fam-tille.de
