On Fri, Feb 27, 2026 at 07:04:49PM -0800, James Montgomery wrote: > Hi Peter, > > I saw your RFA for stunnel4 and I am interested in adopting the package. > I've previously helped with other Debian packages and would like to step up to > maintainership with this one.
That's great :) Just bear in mind that stunnel packaging is a bit more complex than some of the other Debian packages out there. For instance, there is one item that I have been putting off for years: renaming the package itself (both binary and source) to "stunnel". The "stunnel4" name is an unfortunate legacy of the now distant past, when stunnel migrated from version 3 to version 4; we have been at version 5 for many years now, and I have put off renaming the package mainly for reasons of backwards incompatibility, but it is high time now. Actually I think I will start that process in the coming day or two; I say "start that process" because it will involve at least one, possibly two trips through the NEW queue. > I've been looking at the current packaging and I have a few initial > improvements > in mind to align it with current best practices: > > 1. Set "Priority: optional" in debian/control to satisfy Lintian. The removal of "Priority: optional" is in line with Policy 3.7.4, section 5.6.6; the Lintian version from Debian unstable will not warn about it, since this is not a problem. "Priority: optional" is dpkg's default now, there is no need to specify it explicitly. So this one is already in line with current best practices :) > 2. Modernize the debhelper setup by switching to "debhelper-compat (= 14)" and > removing the "X-DH-Compat" header. If you look at the debhelper manual page in testing or unstable, you will see that the X-DH-Compat header is the recommended way now; debhelper looks for it first. Also, just in case you've seen a pedantic-level Lintian message, yes, debhelper does recommend that the header's name be spelled exactly that way. So this one is also in line with current best practices :) > 3. Address bug #826883 by standardizing the systemd unit names (e.g. renaming > [email protected] to a more conventional [email protected]) and > potentially removing the associated Lintian override. I chose the "stunnel.service" name for the systemd file deliberately because the package shall be renamed to "stunnel" and I wanted to make sure that people who enable per-config-file systemd units will not have to rename them soon. This is by design. Also, the #826883 bug itself will go away soon in a different way: once the stunnel4 package is renamed to stunnel, I also intend to drop the "start all the configured tunnels" SysV init script because it has long been unsupported by upstream, a Debian-specific addition, and it requires that the stunnel configuration deviate from recommended upstream best practices (e.g. it relies on PID files). So, once that is removed, there will be no SysV init script without a corresponding systemd unit file :) > 4. Fix the case of the "version" field in debian/watch. Take a look at the debian-watch(5) manual page in testing or unstable; the first paragraph consisting of a single "Version: 5" line is exactly as recommended there. > I've already retitled the bug to ITA and set myself as the owner. > > Since I'm new to being the primary maintainer, I'd really value any advice or > specific areas of the code you think I should focus on. If you're open to it, > I'd appreciate any feedback on these proposed changes as I get started. Well, TBH, first I would recommend making sure that you do your package builds on either a testing or unstable system, so that you can use the most recent versions of the Debian packaging tools and so adhere to current best practices :) Other than that, could you please hold off making any changes to the repository for a couple of days? I think I will really start the package rename process Real Soon Now(tm). But apart from that, it's great that you want to help, and actually taking on a not-trivial package is a good way to learn how to handle the not-trivial parts of Debian packaging :) I will be glad to help with that. G'luck, Peter -- Peter Pentchev [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] PGP key: https://www.ringlet.net/roam/roam.key.asc Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115 C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13
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