Bug#1093192: #1093192 "ITS: vtgrab": no uploaders specified?

[Chris Hofstaedtler]

2. Put the mailing list address in the Maintainer field.
In the Uploaders field, put the team members who care for the package.

[..]

3. Maintainer: salvage team

[..]

3 is a better fit for what I term dead-end packages
(ones that truly no-one cares about, with no upstream,
or no maintainer, or no utility, or otherwise 0 forward motion;
and with little potential to generate bugs except 1 FTBFS/decade).
This is most of the salvage team packages.

Why are what you call "dead-end packages" "salvaged" at all? I seem
to recall that the salvaging process is for packages you actually
want to maintain.

Because a more aggressive RM RoQA policy got me yelled at last time
for making work for the ftpmasters, so I stopped arguing for RMs
and do Andreas' preferred methodology of salvaging everything.
Doing this allows packages that tend to be in a functionally-orphaned
state to be team-maintained in the long term. This satisfies the salvage
criteria as I see them and I have an equal interest in every weird
ancient FTBFS these packages generate.

If you are still interested in them, then properly document this and
add yourself to Uploaders:

Not doing this seems like a clear abuse of the ITS process to me.

Otherwise if you just want to "create facts", do an O: upload and
set Maintainer: Debian QA Group.

Chris

[Tobias Frost]

Post by Chris Hofstaedtler

2. Put the mailing list address in the Maintainer field.
In the Uploaders field, put the team members who care for the package.

[..]

3. Maintainer: salvage team

[..]

3 is a better fit for what I term dead-end packages
(ones that truly no-one cares about, with no upstream,
or no maintainer, or no utility, or otherwise 0 forward motion;
and with little potential to generate bugs except 1 FTBFS/decade).
This is most of the salvage team packages.

Why are what you call "dead-end packages" "salvaged" at all? I seem
to recall that the salvaging process is for packages you actually
want to maintain.

Because a more aggressive RM RoQA policy got me yelled at last time
for making work for the ftpmasters, so I stopped arguing for RMs
and do Andreas' preferred methodology of salvaging everything.
Doing this allows packages that tend to be in a functionally-orphaned
state to be team-maintained in the long term. This satisfies the salvage
criteria as I see them and I have an equal interest in every weird
ancient FTBFS these packages generate.

If you are still interested in them, then properly document this and
Not doing this seems like a clear abuse of the ITS process to me.

Yes, indeed. The ITS process is not a process to orphan packages,
it is for taking over maintainership. Long term interest in the
package maintainainership is required. This is explictly spelled
out in the procedures, refer to
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#package-salvaging

The only process that leads to orphaned packages and has project
consensus is by maintainer action or the MIA process.

If a package is no longer useful, it should be removed.
A removal can be announced throught the BTS in advance, for example
something like https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1091838

[Andreas Tille]

Post by Chris Hofstaedtler
If you are still interested in them, then properly document this and

Message taken.

Post by Chris Hofstaedtler
Not doing this seems like a clear abuse of the ITS process to me.

It was never our intention to abuse any process. I understand your point
and acknowledge that наб and I unintentionally exceeded the intended
scope of the ITS specification. I'm not a native speaker, but to me, the
term "abuse" implies bad intent, which was never the case. We tried to
prevent packages from becoming unmaintained, and I stand by the fact
that we have successfully done so. If the ITS process is not the right
one, we may need a new process. However, an arbitrary bug report is not
the appropriate place to discuss this.

Post by Chris Hofstaedtler
Otherwise if you just want to "create facts", do an O: upload and
set Maintainer: Debian QA Group.

As I said in my other mail the initial goal was far from "creating
facts". We were a bit overwhelmed by what we've found. It might be
sensible to release several packages from Salvage Team to Debian QA
Group in the long run.

For the moment I see no actual harm done since packages in the Salvage
Team space are as open for anybody to do a team upload as Debian QA
maintained packages with the additional advantage that you find these on
one place on Salsa.

Am I missing something?

Kind regards
Andreas.