There is a recurrent unpleasant topic on various Debian lists. From time to
time, we read complaints that specific maintainers are not fit to be Debian
Developers (anymore) because, allegedly, they are not doing job at maintaining
one or several packages.

Those situations are very hard to deal with in a volunteer project and often we
do not do the right thing. For instance, in most cases the complainers are just
failing to acknowledge that, like it or not, we all do mistakes from time to
time. Furthermore, the emergence of those situations most likely means that we
are not doing a good job at a larger scale, for instance during the NM process
or in periodic developer's training.

Nonetheless, we cannot deny that there *might* be cases where we need to deal
with developers that should not be developers anymore. Some of those cases are
documented, some are not. For instance, negligence to follow the DMUP [1] is
ground for expulsion (proposal) and it's documented in the DMUP itself.

Repeated technical negligence per se is ground for expulsion as well, and DAM
has dealt with similar issues in the past. AFAIK, however, that is not
documented properly. I believe that having it documented would reduce the
recurrence of ad hominem flames on -private/-devel/etc. Hopefully people will
then just resort to the appropriate documented channel, instead of letting
their own frustration grow to the point of outbursting in some flame.

Hi henceforth suggest to document in the devref that people who want to report
repeated technical negligence, and alleged unfitness for project membership,
should do so contacting DAM and the DPL, in a timely manner. That would not be
a change to the status quo, just proper documentation for it.

Cheers.

[1] http://www.debian.org/devel/dmup

tags 620686 + patch
thanks

hi Holger,

please find attached a patch.

thanks,
serafi

hi zack & serafi,

zack, 15 years ago you reported #620686 and now serafi thankfully
wrote a patch, which I applaud, however I'm not entirely sure whether
it's not a bit too harsh, thus I would like a comment from you...

(I fear that people could use this paragraph (as it is) to justify
reporting people for a few mistakes and I also wonder whether the
community should be mentioned in this paragraph as well.)

anyway here it is:

s#community#community team#

I agree with Holger, this does not match current practice.
In practice packages are marked RC-buggy and removed from testing.

Cheers,

that's not what I said. Also I do agree with zack in the initial
bug report that this *is* current practice.

I said the wording in serafi's patch was too harsh.

this is also correct.

hi folks,

all good points. please find attached a revised patch.

thanks,
serafi

thank you, much better indeed, applied in git and will upload shortly!