Recently andreas-tille sent the following message about libzstd to
debian-devel
I'd like to repeat that I'm really convinced that libzstd should *not*
be maintained in the Debian Med team but rather some core team in
Debian. It is here for historic reasons but should have moved somewhere
more appropriately since it became its general importance.
It ended up being transferred to the rpm team, which got it out of the
med team's
hair but I'm not convinced the rpm team satisfies "some core team" any
better
than the med team does.
As far as I can tell Debian has broadly 3 types of teams.
1. Teams focussed on an application area, for example the med team, the
science team, the games team.
2. Teams focussed on a programming language, for example the python
team, the perl team, the rust team. There is however no such team for
software written in C, C++ or shell script.
3. Teams focussed on a particular piece of software
As far as I can tell this means that there are a bunch of packages that
"fall between the gaps", packages
that are of high importance to Debian as a whole but are not a great fit
for any team. They either end up not associated with a team at all or
sometimes associated with a team who happened to be the first to
use the library.
I decided to get a sample of packages that could be considered "core",
obviously different people have different ideas of what should be
considered core but I decided to do the following to get a list of
packages that hopefully most people would consider core.
debootstrapped a new sid chroot
ran tasksel install standard (a bit less spartan than just the base system)
ran apt-get install build-essential (we are an opensource project,
development tools are essential to us)
ran apt-get install dctrl-tools (arguablly not core, but I needed it to
run the test commands and it's only one package)
There were 355 packages installed, built from 223 source packages. I got
a list of source packages with
the command
grep-dctrl installed /var/lib/dpkg/status -n -ssource:package | cut -d '
' -f 1 | sort | uniq > sourcepks.txt
I then extracted the source stanzas with.
grep-dctrl -e -F Package `sed "s/.*/^&$/" sourcepks.txt | paste -s -d
'|'`
/var/lib/apt/lists/deb.debian.org_debian_dists_sid_main_source_Sources >
sourcestanzas.txt
Then wrote a little python script to extract teams from those stanzas.
#!/usr/bin/python3
from debian import deb822
import collections
import sys
f = open(sys.argv[1])
counts = collections.defaultdict(int)
for source in deb822.Sources.iter_paragraphs(f):
maintainers = [source['maintainer']]
if 'uploaders' in source:
maintainers += source['uploaders'].split(',')
maintainers = [s.strip() for s in maintainers if s.strip() != '']
teams = [s for s in maintainers if ('team' in s.lower()) or
('lists' in s.lower()) or ('maintainers' in s.lower()) or ('group' in
s.lower())]
teams.sort()
counts[tuple(teams)] += 1
#print(repr(maintainers))
#print(repr(teams));
for teams , count in sorted(counts.items(), key = lambda x: x[1]):
if len(teams) == 0:
teamtext = 'no team'
else:
teamtext = ', '.join(teams)
print(str(count) + ' ' + teamtext)
This confirms my suspiscions, of the 223 source packages responsible
for the packages installed in my "reasonablly but not super minimal"
environment more than half of them were not associated with a team at all.
I also saw a couple of packages in there maintained by the science team
and the med team. two source packages telnet and apt-listchanges
were orphaned.
I do not know what the soloution is, whether a "core team" is a good idea
or even whether one is possible at all but I feel this is an elephant that
should have some light shone on it.
