Multimedia Teams in Debian

[tim hall]

Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> Felipe Sateler <fsateler at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>>> If the debian-multimedia team is indeed dead, we should avoid setting it
>>> in the maintainer field of any package. Nobody is served with
>>> unreachable (or non-existant) maintainers.
>> Note that the (some?) maintainers are still active AFAICS, it's just that the 
>> list itself isn't useful. I haven't seen much collaboration.
> 
> Well, this rather supports my suggestion to not use the mailing list in
> the maintainer field, doesn't it?

Not directly, no. However, it does bear further discussion.

The debian-multimedia team currently maintains:

     main:   aeolus, amb-plugins, ams, amsynth, ardour, ardour-altivec, 
ardour-i686, audacity, blepvco, create-resources, das-watchdog, 
fil-plugins, flake, fluidsynth-dssi, fusd-kor-source, gigedit, glashctl, 
hexter, hydrogen-drumkits, jackd, jackeq, kmidimon, libclalsadrv-dev, 
libclalsadrv1, libclthreads-dev, libclthreads2, libclxclient-dev, 
libclxclient3, libflake-dev, libfreebob0, libfreebob0-dev, libfusd-dev, 
libfusd1, libgavl-dev, libgavl0, libjack-dev, libjack0, 
libjack0.100.0-0, libjack0.100.0-dev, ll-scope, mcp-plugins, mhwaveedit, 
omins, opencubicplayer*, opencubicplayer-doc*, openmovieeditor, 
qtractor, rev-plugins, rosegarden, rosegarden-data, schism*, sineshaper, 
stops, traverso*, vco-plugins, vkeybd, wavbreaker, wsynth-dssi, xsynth-dssi
     non-free:   midisport-firmware

- the majority of which are actively maintained. Currently watching 
Aeolus-0.8.1 and Ardour-2.4.1. It looks as if Rosegarden-1.6 is back in 
testing. I'm not sure about the status of qtractor. New versions of 
libfreebob0 and openmovieeditor are available. I'm sure omins should 
have been orphaned along with om-synth, does anyone know of a reason we 
should be keeping it? Really we should be packaging Ingen instead. Some 
of these: Ardour; Jackd; Rosegarden et al. are flagship multimedia 
packages - i.e. they are important to us. (not the same as technically 
Important)

Debian-multimedia is a Good Name - an obvious place to look if you don't 
otherwise know where to discuss multimedia topics on Debian. The list is 
only not useful because none of you use it. Pkg-multimedia-maintainers 
is an alioth.debian list, people are not going to subscribe to a list 
with a name like that unless they know they need to.

The issue of co-maintenance is more thorny. Ideally, the above packages 
should have a proper human maintainer and in fact, some of them do, but 
they aren't DDs, which is why we have this confusing hodge-podge instead.

I'd like to see debian-multimedia used to discuss multimedia-specific qa 
issues (amongst other stuff), which is what debian-qa (more-or-less) 
expects us to be doing. I know this is tantamount to herding cats, but 
it should be the appropriate list for everyone involved in multimedia on 
Debian to focus on. I'm not sure that this is a good time to dig up the 
roses, but I think it would be useful to open up a wide-ranging 
discussion of the issues.

cheers,

tim