TextIndexNG or the problems of group maintainance

[Fabio Tranchitella]

* 2007-07-30 10:38, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi,

Hi Andreas,

> I personally trusted that "anybody" of the group will care and lost
> interest (perhaps it is my fault - I do not want to blame somebody else
> for this). Today the website
> 
>     http://www.zope.org/Members/ajung/TextIndexNG
> 
> says: TextIndexNG2 is no longer maintainted and the successor is
> TextIndexNG3 at
> 
>     http://opensource.zopyx.com/software/textindexng3
> 
> in version 3.2.1 - so we are way behind upstream.

You are right, this is a general problem of teams: nobody feels like
responsible for the package. We can improve this, but I think that every
package should have at least an interested maintainer (which uses the
package, that's it).

For the specific case of textindexng, I'll take care of it when I'm back
from my VAC, as I use it for my daily work.

> Another package I handed over to group maintainance is zope-testcase.
> This package was completely droped - well, this might be better than
> unmaintained, but it was a nice tool for quality checking.

In this case you are wrong: zope-testcase merged in zope2.8, so it is
available out-of-the box in the zope2.X packages where X >= 8.

> So the question is: Are we able to avoid the situation that some
> packages come out of our focus and become way outdated?  How can we
> avoid that single maintainers blindly trust a group that has no
> generic interest in a single package?

This is a general problem in Debian teams: how other teams solve it?

> IMHO a first step would be to do an automatic uscan and publish
> the result on a web page or even better send a monthly uscan report
> to the mailing list.  Any other thoughs about this?

I like the idea (and to say the truth, I already have such a script for
my packages). I'll configure it to send the e-mails to the list.

Thanks,

-- 
Fabio Tranchitella                         http://www.kobold.it
Free Software Developer and Consultant     http://www.tranchitella.it
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