7.4. Dealing with inactive and/or unreachable maintainers

If you notice that a package is lacking maintenance, you should make sure that the maintainer is active and will continue to work on their packages. It is possible that they are not active anymore, but haven’t registered out of the system, so to speak. On the other hand, it is also possible that they just need a reminder.

There is a simple system (the MIA database) in which information about maintainers who are deemed Missing In Action is recorded. When a member of the QA group contacts an inactive maintainer or finds more information about one, this is recorded in the MIA database. This system is available in /org/qa.debian.org/mia on the host qa.debian.org, and can be queried with the mia-query tool. Use mia-query --help to see how to query the database. If you find that no information has been recorded about an inactive maintainer yet, or that you can add more information, you should generally proceed as follows.

The first step is to politely contact the maintainer, and wait a reasonable time for a response. It is quite hard to define reasonable time, but it is important to take into account that real life is sometimes very hectic. One way to handle this would be to send a reminder after two weeks.

A non-functional e-mail address is a violation of Debian Policy. If an e-mail “bounces”, please file a bug against the package and submit this information to the MIA database.

If the maintainer doesn’t reply within four weeks (a month), one can assume that a response will probably not happen. If that happens, you should investigate further, and try to gather as much useful information about the maintainer in question as possible. This includes:

• The echelon information available through the developers’ LDAP database, which indicates when the developer last posted to a Debian mailing list. (This includes mails about uploads distributed via the debian-devel-changes@lists.debian.org list.) Also, remember to check whether the maintainer is marked as on vacation in the database.

• The number of packages this maintainer is responsible for, and the condition of those packages. In particular, are there any RC bugs that have been open for ages? Furthermore, how many bugs are there in general? Another important piece of information is whether the packages have been NMUed, and if so, by whom.

• Is there any activity of the maintainer outside of Debian? For example, they might have posted something recently to non-Debian mailing lists or news groups.

A bit of a problem are packages which were sponsored — the maintainer is not an official Debian developer. The echelon information is not available for sponsored people, for example, so you need to find and contact the Debian developer who has actually uploaded the package. Given that they signed the package, they’re responsible for the upload anyhow, and are likely to know what happened to the person they sponsored.

It is also allowed to post a query to debian-devel@lists.debian.org, asking if anyone is aware of the whereabouts of the missing maintainer. Please Cc: the person in question.

Once you have gathered all of this, you can contact mia@qa.debian.org. People on this alias will use the information you provide in order to decide how to proceed. For example, they might orphan one or all of the packages of the maintainer. If a package has been NMUed, they might prefer to contact the NMUer before orphaning the package — perhaps the person who has done the NMU is interested in the package.

One last word: please remember to be polite. We are all volunteers and cannot dedicate all of our time to Debian. Also, you are not aware of the circumstances of the person who is involved. Perhaps they might be seriously ill or might even have died — you do not know who may be on the receiving side. Imagine how a relative will feel if they read the e-mail of the deceased and find a very impolite, angry and accusing message!

On the other hand, although we are volunteers, a package maintainer has made a commitment and therefore has a responsibility to maintain the package. So you can stress the importance of the greater good — if a maintainer does not have the time or interest anymore, they should let go and give the package to someone with more time and/or interest.

If you are interested in working on the MIA team, please have a look at the README file in /org/qa.debian.org/mia on qa.debian.org, where the technical details and the MIA procedures are documented, and contact mia@qa.debian.org.