Hello everyone, and Paul,
It got to my attention the rsync is a little behind our standards wrt to packaging and it looks like the maintainer doesn't have time to deal with that at the moment.
Basically what I want to do is to upload the new release (along with some packaging fixes), adding new Uploaders while keeping the original Maintainer, or maybe moving it to a team while also keeping the original maintainer.
The few changes that I already made:
- Package the last release (which fixes a good amount of bugs and security issues)
- Create a git repo on Salsa and use git for packaging [0]
- Fix d/watch in order to be able to use uscan to download new releases
Things that I would like to have fixed, either for Buster or later:
- Use debhelper with quilt instead of a complex d/rules that manually apply patches
- Use autopkgtests
- Bug triage
I understand that as I'm not familiar with the rsync packaging, some of the things may have been a explicit maintainer choice with a rational behind it, and that could be either spotted by a more experienced Debian Developer, explained by Paul, or discovered when changing it.
Here are the points which leads me to think the maintainer might need help with rsync:
- Last upload of rsync from maintainer was almost 2 years ago
- Last upload of maintainer (any package) was in March 2017
- There were two NMUs after that
- There is an open bug (#906895) since January asking for packaging of the new release, without replies from maintainer[1]
- A lot of open bugs, 74 as of now.
On a side note, I can see that there was recent (August 2018) email activity from Paul, so hopefully he may reply something about this.
Overall, I can see that rsync is not a simple package to deal with, Paul having made a great job for many years all by himself, I would like to receive help with that so we all can ship a better rsync on Buster :)
The transition freeze is for 12th January of 2019, so we would need to upload this new release asap, in order to account for time to fix any RC bug that may show up before the new release enters Testing. We can also pick which changes we want to ship for Buster and which ones we want to upload to experimental because we don't wanna risk introducing bugs that close to the freeze.
Thanks,
--
Samuel Henrique <samueloph>