Shifting Emphasis

I joined the Debian project in late 1994, well before the first stable release was issued, and have been involved in various ways continuously ever since. Over the years, I adopted a number of packages that are, or at least were at one time, fundamental to the distribution.

But, not surprisingly, my interests have shifted over time. In the more than quarter century I've contributed to Debian, I've adopted existing packages that needed attention, packaged new software I wanted to use that wasn't yet in Debian, offered packages up for others to adopt, and even sometimes requested the removal of packages that became obsolete or replaced by something better. That all felt completely healthy.

But over the last couple weeks, I realized I'm still "responsible" for some packages I'd had for a very long time, that generally work well but over time have accumulated bugs in functionality I just don't use, and frankly haven't been able to find the motivation to chase down. As one example, I just noticed that I first uploaded the gzip package 25 years ago today, on 2 December 1995. And while the package works fine for me and most other folks, there are 30 outstanding bugs and 3 forwarded bugs that I just can't muster up any energy to address.

So, I just added gzip to a short list of packages I've offered up for adoption recently. I'm pleased that tar already has a new maintainer, and hope that both sudo and gzip will get more attention soon.

It's not that I'm less interested in Debian. I've just been busy recently packaging up more software I use or want to use in designing high power model rockets and the solid propellant motors I fly in them, and would rather spend the time I have available for Debian maintaining those packages and all their various build dependencies than continuing to be responsible for core packages in the distribution that "work fine for me" but could use attention.

I'm writing about this partly to mark the passing of more than a quarter century as a package maintainer for Debian, partly to encourage other Debian package maintainers with the right skills and motivation to consider adopting some of the packages I'm giving up, and finally to encourage other long-time participants in Debian to spend a little time evaluating their own package lists in a similar way.