Re: Maintaining potentially orphaned packages in Debian Commons team

Le Fri, Jun 05, 2026 at 06:34:02PM +0500, Andrey Rakhmatullin a écrit :
> 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. (…)

Another upside is that, simply put, it *works*.

I ended up adopting unmaintained high popcon packages because they had been
formally orphaned, and I did not want to see them dropped from Debian. Had
they not been orphaned, I would have done nothing.

In a similar way, I orphaned all my packages when giving up on my activities
as a Debian Developer, and this triggerd e-mails from people wanting to take
them over. Almost all of them got new maintainers in a matter of weeks (even
the low popcon ones).

A package that is not maintained (= has no actual people truly dedicated to
its maintenance) should be orphaned, otherwise there is no way to know about
its actual lack of maintainer. If the previous maintainers have disappeared,
some other process has to lead to a formal orphaning (I guess it is what MIA
is for, but it does not seem to be used for real).

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