On Thursday, June 5, 2025 10:53:17 AM Mountain Standard Time Ahmad Khalifa wrote: > Looks like you took over maintainership completely. Not that you > provided help and collaborated with the original maintainer. > > This looks more like a package that should have been orphaned long ago > when it was removed from testing. The RFH just helped you stumble upon it.
The situation was a little more nuanced than that. It is correct to say that the package should have been orphaned. By the time I started looking at it, the prior maintainer was completely unresponsive. I attempted to contact him several times offering to co-maintain the package, but never received a response. My interest in the package was that I use it myself and it was not in good shape. I did not find the package by looking directly at RFH bugs, but rather by looking at the packages’ tracker page: https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/courier One of the nice things about tracker is that it prominently lists open RFH bugs in the top center. I went to the page to determine why the package was no longer in testing and discovered that it would soon be entirely removed from Debian due to serious bugs. The RFH bug indicated that at some point in the past, before the previous maintainer had become completely unresponsive, he had been willing to accept help maintaining the package. When I was not successful in contacting the previous maintainer, I adopted the package. If there had not been an RFH bug, I would have had to do a formal salvage process, which I might not have started or which might have taken longer. The RFH bug was a nice open door saying, “Come on in”. It meant that I could start working on the package while waiting to hear back from the maintainer, (which never happened). If it hadn’t been for the RFH, Courier would likely not have made it into trixie. This is a very complex piece of software with a lot of non-trivial open bugs and some antiquated package design. Many people use the software in ways I don’t. Making changes too quickly would likely end up unintentionally breaking production systems. However, I was able to safely clean it up enough to get it into trixie. Going forward, I expect it will take about 2 years to full clean up the package and all outstanding bugs. As has already been mentioned in this thread, RFH bugs are often filed when maintainers are looking for experienced co-maintainers, usually with very difficult packages, which are often in bad shape. As such, they should probably be understood as Request For Experienced Developers To Help (but RFEDTH is a little long). They are probably the very last thing that a new contributor would be prepared to tackle. It might be best to adjust our documentation to not steer new contributors towards them, but rather towards the debian-mentors mailing list, where people can point them to some beginning tasks if they ask. -- Soren Stoutner so...@debian.org
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