Maintaining potentially orphaned packages in Debian Commons team

Andreas Tille <[email protected]> Fri, 5 Jun 2026 14:30:35 +0200
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hi,

I'd like to propose some procedure for packages that appear to lack
active maintenance, but where no formal orphaning has taken place.  Lets
have a look for instance at clucene-core:

  1. High popcon[1]
  2. Important rdepends like libreoffice-core
  3. Maintainer was contacted in #879296, but there has been no response
     recorded there; the last upload was nearly ten years ago
  4. Uploader was asked about interest to become Maintainer four
     years ago with no response[2]
  5. Open bug with patch to solve reproducibly problem #1059805
     requested by libreoffice maintainer with no progress since
     nearly two years
  6. Package was NMUed three times in a row (one 64-bit time_t,
     others to fix RC bugs)

One possible solution to consider would be to move the package to Debian
Commons maintenance, host it in the Debian team on Salsa, and upload the
change with a delayed upload to allow objections.  For the example above
I prepared this in

  https://salsa.debian.org/debian/clucene-core

This example should simply give some evidence that we might need some
solution which does not block contributors to invest some time into
packages.  While another NMU would address the immediate issue, it would
not improve the long-term maintenance situation of the package.

Since this is not the only example we have I would like to go beyond
this example and start a discussion about criteria under which a move to
Debian Commons maintenance could be proposed.  (BTW, thanks a lot to
Paul for this suggestion which enabled me to have finally all my
packages team maintained.)

Possible criteria might include:

  * no maintainer upload for N years (combined with unsuccessful contact
    attempts)
  * repeated NMUs
  * unanswered contact attempts
  * pending fixes from contributors
  * importance of the package within Debian

Are these reasonable indicators, and are there others that should be
considered?  The delayed upload would provide another opportunity for
any interested maintainer or uploader to object, participate, or take
over maintenance.  The Debian Commons maintenance model is also easy to
reverse if an existing maintainer returns or another person volunteers
to take over primary responsibility for the package.

The goal is not to replace maintainers who are still interested in their
packages, but to provide a straightforward path to propose ongoing
maintenance when there is no active maintainer involvement.

Debian already has contributors willing to maintain such packages. The
question is how we can provide a clear and scalable path for those
contributors to assume ongoing responsibility when traditional
single-maintainer maintenance has effectively become inactive.

Kind regards
    Andreas.

[1] https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=clucene-core
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=879296#15
[3] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=team%2Bdebian%40tracker.debian.org
    https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2026/05/msg00105.html

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