unmaintained packages hidden by team maintenance (was Re: Bits from the DPL)

On Wed Feb 4, 2026 at 5:38 PM GMT, Andreas Tille wrote:
> 2.1. MIA team
snip
>    4. in case of no answer, the MIA team will make one manual attempt 
>    to reach the person, indicating that failing to get a response on 
>    that, the person's packages (if any) will be orphaned

I'm a big fan of packages being team maintained by default.

However, an ostensibly team-maintained package which is de-facto only 
actually maintained by one developer, will languish if that developer is 
MIA, and would not be caught by the above step.

So as the ratio of team-maintained packages increases, the gain achieved 
by orphaning directly-maintained packages as part of the MIA process 
goes down.

Has anyone got any plans to try and identify and track such packages?



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