Putting my Debian Developer hat on. Definitions:
* DD = Debian Developer = member of the Debian project. Has access to the mechanism to place a package in Debian. The name "Developer" does not imply any software development work, just membership in the Debian project. * non-DD: a sapient being that is not a DD * hir: his or her * TeXmacs: a scientific WYSIWYG document editor (capabilities of LaTeX and better) and also interface to various Computer Algebra systems. See http://www.texmacs.org/ . On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 09:52:33PM +0100, Joris van der Hoeven wrote: > On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 10:52:34AM -0600, Corey Sweeney wrote: >> On 1/19/07, Joris van der Hoeven <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> On Fri, Jan 19, 2007 at 10:10:41AM +0100, Bas Spitters wrote: >>>> Texmacs has been orphaned in Debian :-( >>> What does that mean, exactly? What should we do about it? >> What that means is that there is no longer anyone on the debian >> team that is assigned to maintain the debian package for texmacs. >> So bug reports will not go anywhere, and the version will not get >> updated. I believe if a debian package is orphaned for long >> enough, it can get dropped from the distribution, but don't quote >> me on that part. That is mostly correct; technically it won't get dropped solely for being orphaned (at least not for some years), but if it accrues bugs above a certain severity level, it will get dropped. These bugs can be bugs in TeXmacs itself or in the packaging (e.g. a change in Debian Policy happens, and the package doesn't adapt to the change). >> Anyway, as to what to do about it, one possibility would be to >> "campain" for a new maintainer. (I.E. try to find someone who's >> interested in becoming part of the debian team, and is willing to >> take on the maintaince of the texmacs package.) > Yep. Anyone on the list who would like to become the Debian > maintainer? I'm not at this point willing to become the Debian maintainer, but I'd be happy to sponsor a non-DD (someone that is not a Debian Developer) that wants to become the Debian maintainer. This means he does the work (and gets all glory and some blame) and I make sure its gets into Debian (and get most of the blame). In more detailed terms, someone that is not a Debian Developer doesn't have access to the "uploading a package to Debian" process. But (s)he can still prepare a Debian package and be known as the primary maintainer to the Debian Bug Tracking System, that is be "the maintainer". (S)he just needs a DD to approve hir packages to get them in Debian. What I call "sponsor" is this approval process. This means I would check his work (quality, obeys to Debian Policy, no obvious "rm -rf /" in the installation scripts, ...) and upload it to Debian. He would be the one that gets the bug reports, does all the work, etc, I just make sure that this potentially evil untrusted (by Debian) person is not trying to install a trojan horse on every Debian installation that installs TeXmacs. Obviously, the hypothetical maintainer may (and I'd probably encourage hir to) start the process to become a DD in parallel. After that process is finished, (s)he can get rid of me and self-approve hir own packages. A non-DD maintainer can also find another sponsor than I if (s)he prefers; I'd suggest [email protected] and [email protected] as contact points for that. In totally unrelated news, I uploaded 1.0.6.8 to the Debian "experimental" section, linking it to Guile 1.8. I do not make any promise on whether I will or will not do that for future stable / unstable releases of TeXmacs. -- Lionel _______________________________________________ Texmacs-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/texmacs-dev
