Re: Maintaining potentially orphaned packages in Debian Commons team

Andrey Rakhmatullin <[email protected]> Fri, 5 Jun 2026 18:34:02 +0500

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

As a preface, I think the Cc list on these emails is horrible but I'm sure 
it's intentional so I'm not dropping anyone.

On Fri, Jun 05, 2026 at 02:30:35PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
>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:

[...]

>One possible solution to consider would be to move the package to Debian
>Commons maintenance,

I still think that formally orphaning unmaintained but not formally 
orphaned packages is the best 
thing (when they can't/shouldn't be RMed) because it's the only thing that 
explicitly marks a package as orphaned, i.e. that nobody cares about it. 
Shoving them into Debian Commons is not better than shoving them into 
random teams as was done before: it still hides their status, adds some 
busywork and prevents them from being formally orphaned for some more 
years.

>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.

*cough* I mean...

>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.

Don't we have a mechanism where a specific really existing person can become a 
maintainer of an unmaintained but not formally orphaned package directly?

-- 
WBR, wRAR

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