Team maintenance for package dia ?

[Philippe SWARTVAGHER]

Hello,

I'm new to the Debian packaging world, but I would like to be involved, 
and intent to adopt [1] the dia package. After a period of hanging out 
on the Debian documentation about packaging and package maintenance, 
following some mailing lists and debconfs, I think I'm ready to 
seriously start working on this package.

I'm sending this message to your team to ask if it could be possible to 
team-maintain (is it the right term ?) the dia package, since it seems 
already be integrated in the Gnome project [2]. I read and heard a lot 
that team maintenance is a good thing for the package itself, but also 
for beginner maintainers (like me!).

The package dia wasn't updated in Debian since February 2020, and it 
contains a source code of 2016. Upstream [3] seems to have only one main 
maintainer, but is still active. However, there was no official upstream 
release since 2014.

I already started to work on the package (a lot of tools to discover: 
schroot, sbuild, git-buildpackage, dch, uscan...!), especially to setup 
git-buildpackage and update the watch file. My plan is the following:
- fix errors reported by lintian and piuparts
- upgrade to the upstream current version/commit
- (linked to the previous point:) make some cleaning in the patches 
(probably some of them are not required anymore after upgrading to 
upstream current version; forward them to upstream if needed, ...)
- bug triage [4]

If you accept the dia package into your team, I have some questions:
- any comment / suggestion on what I already did and what I'm planning 
to do with the dia package ?
- should I contact upstream to clarify the release policy ? (do we need 
to wait for an official release, or just regularly update to the last 
upstream commit ?)
- if upstream doesn't provide releases, and we have to regularly upgrade 
to the last upstream commit, do we need a d/watch file ? If yes, what 
should it track ?
- if dia is team-maintenained, do I need to send an "official" RFS when 
the package will be ready to release, or just dropping an email to the 
team is enough ?
- could you create a repository on salsa and add me as a member ? My 
username on salsa is phsw
That's all for the moment, I probably will have more questions going 
further in the packaging process ! :)

If I succeed with the dia package, there are also the packages 
dia-shapes and autodia, which are currently maintained by the QA team, 
and, if I understand correctly the role of this team, they would be 
happy if someone else can take care of these packages !

Looking forward to your reply,

Philippe.

PS: why this mailing list isn't listed on [5] ?

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=982055
[2] https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia/
[3] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/dia/
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?repeatmerged=no&src=dia
[5] https://lists.debian.org/completeindex.html

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