(this mail originates in recent mails in -release about the status of the shadow package...I took this opportunity for making an update about it. For people not aware of it, the shadow source package builds the login and passwd binary packages we use on each and every default Debian installation)
Followup to -devel only, please...I hope I did The Right Thing in headers...I'm always confused with this stuff. For people wondering about the status of shadow, this is a quite complicated story: -upstream development (Tomasz Kloczko) is now again quite active. Version 4.0.8 in preparation and, given the changes appearing in the CVS, probably not ready for be blindly incorporated in a Debian release -Debian package is "stucked" at 4.0.3 with numerous patches which never made it upstream, (especially to su). The listed package maintainers are Karl Ramm and Sam Hartman. Only (mostly l10n) NMU's from myself were made in the last 6 months. -there are no release critical bugs in the BTS, but a lot of bugs which at least need some triage -low maintenance of the Debian package. Karl Ramm is very discreet these times (indeed I didn't heard from him since July 2004). Sam Hartman is responsive to help requests, but, from his own words, cannot handle the package maintenance. Up to now, I was myself giving help with regards to l10n updates (induced by work around the installer localisation)....but more and more slipping to becoming the maintainer of that package The package as is CAN be included in sarge. There is nothing "critical" there...only a concern about the future of this package in Debian. It's probably time for this package to be taken over (one could say "hijacked" but people who know me are aware of my concerns about respecting other people's work...which includes the work of Karl Ramm, the current maintainer), especially when it comes at post-sarge developments. For sarge, we can only focus on RC bugs and deal with them by NMU's (I now consider those as implicitely made with maintainer's agreement) I an in the process of preparing a development area on alioth and am waiting for it to be opened. In the same time, I'm slowly working on isolating Debian patches to the source code so that they can be examined along with upstream and be included to it, or kept as specific patches. This required moving the package to dpatch which is currenly not easy, given the number of Debian-specific patches.... I will certainly call for help as soon as infrastructure is ready. Shadow needs a small team maintenance, especially with people able to understand the code (which I'm not, definitely). I definitely CANNOT handle this alone. So, if you feel concerned or think you can bring something, feel free to react. I would prefer public discussions at this point, though...even if they're lost in -devel "noise".... --
