Multimedia Teams in Debian

[tim hall]

Felipe Sateler wrote:
> On Thursday 24 April 2008 08:36:52 Joost Yervante Damad wrote:
>> In my opinion the packages would be better served if they just had
>> individual maintainers assigned. This is one of the reasons I removed my
>> timidity package from the debian-multimedia team.
> 
> I think packages would be better served by real team collaboration. What I saw 
> was that d-m was just a place where people ask for a sponsor for 
> multimedia-related packages instead of a place where people ask for (and 
> receive) help maintaining their packages, which is what I think is more 
> useful (does this happen in pkg-multimedia?).

My own position on this will always be pragmatic: let's do what keeps 
the most up-to date versions of multimedia packages in Debian, which 
seems to be a bit of both in practice. The 'official' position AFAIU is 
that packages should be maintained by an individual DD. However I don't 
think this is an argument against real team collaboration, for now I 
would appreciate it if we could keep the discussion alive on 
debian-multimedia. The fact is, also, that several of the packages are 
maintained by non-DDs via sponsors and I for one am grateful for all 
these efforts. I have had discussions with debian-qa types who have 
tried to tell me that this is an abuse of the system, but I think it's 
fairer to describe it as sub-optimal. So far, no-one has really tried to 
make an issue of it, which is nice. I guess we're all reasonably 
familiar with Debian politic.

I don't maintain any packages, so I'm not on pkg-multimedia-maintainers, 
my understanding is that p-m-m *is* the place for actual collaborative 
maintenance. I'm happy to do a bit of supportive admin, keep an eye on 
qa issues and generally try to make sure everyone keeps communicating. 
I'm also more than happy to lend a hand with non-programming issues such 
as iconography and documentation if anyone would find that useful. I'm 
open to constructive suggestions, as always.

Right now, I think the most important thing is to keep communicating and 
focus on getting the maximum number of multimedia packages to build 
cleanly on all architectures under lenny; and then to clearly deprecate 
the rest. Are there any packages that we already *know* are dead? I'm 
sad to lose tapiir and om (ingen), but I haven't found time to compile 
them either and I guess that's how we sort the wheat from the chaff.

cheers,

tim