Dear Fesco: Orphan package process needs work

[David Woodhouse]

On Thu, 2006-10-05 at 16:06 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> We had people ready to step up beforehand.  I had volunteered, and 
> perhaps others.  But david said he had it, so it was left alone.
> 
 ...
> 
> There was fair warning, but nothing anyone can do if the owner is 
> holding a package hostage.  David, the owner, said he would do it, and 
> didn't.  And then it was dropped.  That's broken.

The reason this doesn't happen in Core is because we tend not to be so
possessive about our packages. With a few highly-strung exceptions, you
can generally just commit sensible fixes to any package which needs them
and the maintainer will be happy that you helped them out. It's a _team_
effort. 

Extras seems to lack that ethos, and people get massively proprietorial
about their packages. And _that_, I think, is the root of the problem
here.

David is busy. He meant to fix it up, but he just didn't get round to it
-- I can sympathise with that. But if this package had been in Core,
someone else would have done it.

-- 
dwmw2