Re: Suggestion for orphaning process (Was: Maintaining potentially orphaned packages in Debian Commons team)

Hi,

On 08/06/26 at 17:01 +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi Paul,
> 
> Am Sat, Jun 06, 2026 at 11:06:40AM +0200 schrieb Paul Gevers:
> > [No need to CC me, I already get this 3 times]
> 
> Reduced the CC to relevant bugs + Maintainer + Uploader.
>  
> > On 6/5/26 22:15, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > > This is exactly the gap I am trying to discuss. If we believes that such
> > > packages should become formally orphaned rather than move to Debian
> > > Commons, what is the practical path to achieve that?
> > 
> > In my opinion, if you want to maintain it in Debian Commons, you are
> > salvaging the package and should use the salvation process. Debian Commons
> > is intended to declare weak ownership, which is something else than no
> > ownership. If you are willing to stick your name to a package in uploaders
> > at least, ITS should work for you already. If you don't, than Debian Commons
> > shouldn't be part of your solution.
> 
> OK, you do not consider Debian Commons part of the solution, and I can
> understand the argument that Debian Commons should only be used when at
> least one person explicitly wants to take ongoing responsibility for the
> package.

I find it a bit frightening that you disagree on the scope of Debian
Commons, and processes around it. Maybe it's a good indicator that it
should be specified more before building more stuff on top of it.

I think that the current discussion could be expressed in terms of
states and transitions.
We used to have two states:
    (M) "packages with, officially, a maintainer",
and (O) "orphaned packages".

We have a process for (O)->(M) (adoption), two processes for
(M)->(O) depending on who initiates it (orphaning if maintainer,
forced-orphaning by MIA team), and a process for (M)->(M') (salvaging).

Now we have an additional state, (W) "package with weak ownership in
Debian Commons". I think that it would be useful to identify the
processes for:
(O)->(W): adoption? but is that really adoption?
(W)->(O): salvaging? who is authoritative otherwise?
(M)->(W) by the maintainer: obvious
(M)->(W) by someone else: focus of this discussion
(W)->(M): who is authoritative to decide that one can take strong
ownership of a package that was previsously weakly-owned by many?

Note that described like that, (M)->(W) can be achieved by
(M)--[salvaging]-->(M')-->(W). That it, using the salvaging process,
someone could take over ownership and then decide to turn it into weak
ownership.

But still, I think that other transitions should be specified...

Lucas