On Sat, 2021-08-14 at 09:04 +0000, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
I think there's some idea to rescue here. I agree that adopting
orphaned packages can be harder than it seems, but OTOH, it's a task
that has big benefits for the community. In the past, the recommended
way to become a packager, and the way that had the easiest process,
was to add a new package. This made a lot of sense when the distro
was
smaller and there were always new things that could be reasonably
added. Nowadays, we either have most upstream projects packaged, or
they are very big and complex to package, or have many dependencies,
or legal issues, or there just isn't that much need to have them
packaged. And all other things being equal, I it's better to have one
package maintained continuously, than a package maintained for some
time and then dropped, and another package maintained. While we may
have a constant of 1 package maintained, the second case disappoints
users.
tl;dr: I think we should change the guidelines [1] to explicitly
recommend opening a pull request for an orphaned package as one of
the
ways. Maybe even describe it first. And describe the steps that need
to be done in detail, so that it's easy to unexperienced folks to
follow.
I can feel the pain of Stephen, as I went through something like that
some years ago, and was quite frustrating.
I was at that time main developer of a small project that was on every
distro, and I was a Fedora user.
I went ahead to build the rpm for fedora and got some tips about how to
improve the spec but I was never able to get an sponsor, and was told
the spec was not fit for Fedora.
In the meantime another user grabbed the spec and sources from
project's csv and submited it as his first package for review.
He got an sponsor right away and became the maintainer of the package,
without changing a line of what I had in csv.
It was really frustrating ... to the point I've never submited another
package for review.
A better - or more clear - way to become a package maintaner would
help.
Some of us would like to help, but can't find a clear way to do it.