maintenance of dpkg (Re: I've verified some dpkg bugs)
[CC: to dpkg-maint since I don't know whether Klee is subscribed to this
list.]
On Sun, 19 Apr 1998, Juan Cespedes wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 17, 1998 at 09:58:20PM +0200, Christian Schwarz wrote:
> >
> > I've just checked out all open bug reports against dpkg and dpkg-dev,
> >
> > Bug reports which can be closed:
> > 16527, (fixed with 1.4.0.20 or .21)
> > 6052, 15157, (1.4.0.22)
> > 6871, (by 1.4.0.19, cf. expired bug#5041)
> > 17238, (that's the 1000/1000 bug--fixed)
>
> We cannot close them because "we are not the maintainer".
[snip]
The current setup of dpkg maintenance is suboptimal, IMO, and this is a
bad thing since dpkg is the most important part of our distribution.
Before discussing different solutions, let me summarize how I see the
current situation--please give me feedback whether this is correct or
not: (the list is unsorted)
- Klee and Ian J. are listed as Maintainer of dpkg.
- Unfortunately, Klee has been too busy to work on dpkg for the last
months. (Please don't take this as accusation. Klee did a great job
as maintainer of dpkg!) Though it's good to see Ian J. taking
part of the dpkg development again, I think we can't expect that our
project leader has enough time for doing the day-to-day maintenance
of dpkg.
- Several other developers have contributed code to dpkg lately, and
made a few (very important) NMUs. Unfortunately, these people can't
close bug reports themselves, and since they aren't mentioned in
the Maintainer field they don't get enough feedback about new problems
or feature requests.
- dpkg' list of open bug reports is one of the longest (if not the
longest). However, a lot of these bug reports have already been fixed
or can be merged. Since all uploads since Jul 97 have been NMUs (!),
only a few bug reports have been closed since then.
- dpkg is very complicated and it's likely that a bug in dpkg crashes
people's installation. Thus, special care has to be taken with changes
in dpkg.
- dpkg is hard to compile (at least for me :). I tried doing so a few
days ago but didn't succeed.
- a CVS server which stores dpkg's source code has been setup up already.
Several developers have write access (who?)
In summary: NMUs are a nice thing to solve short-term problems (e.g., if a
maintainer is busy), but a package can't be maintained only be NMUs,
especially if it's our most important package.
I'd suggest the following setup: (please take this as a first suggestion
only! everything is open for discussion, of course, any _any_ feedback
is welcomed!)
- dpkg is not considered as 'native Debian package' anymore, but as
independent package which has (possibly different) upstream maintainers
and a Debian maintainer
- there will be a team upstream maintainers, who all have write access to
the CVS archive. I think the following people could be part of this
team (the list is taken from the people who made NMUs before--please
just take this is a _suggestion_): Ian J., Klee, Juan, Guy, Michael,
Miquel.
- there will be one Debian maintainer who will package up dpkg, who
maintains the bug reports (answers arriving reports, closes them, etc.)
This person could be part of the dpkg dev team, but doesn't necessarily
have to be. He must have enough time for the day-to-day maintenance.
(It currently looks to me like Juan would be the right person for this
job.)
(Note, that if noone should want to take this job, I'd volunteer, too.
However, I'm sure we have developers with better dpkg knowledge
around, who'd do a better job than myself.)
Any comments are appreciated!
Again, please let me stress that this is not meant as critics on any
developer working on dpkg! But I think it would be good to `restructure'
dpkg's maintainer setup a bit to better match with reality.
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Debian has a logo! schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
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pages at http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/debian-logo/
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