Bazaar and Debian

[Martin Pool]

On Jun 24, 2013 1:43 PM, "Richard Stallman" <rms at gnu.org> wrote:
>
>         [ NSA and FBI agents reading my email: consider whether
>         [ defending the US Constitution against all enemies,
>         [ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example.
>
> There is somewhat of a misunderstanding in the idea that "GNU" could
> "become the primary project maintainer".  GNU is an operating system;
> it can't maintain software.

If I say that "Australia played New Zealand on the weekend" you can
probably guess I don't mean the land masses or the entire countries.

> The GNU Project can maintain software, but the way the GNU Project
> does anything is through volunteers.  Thus, every GNU package has one
> or more persons who are the maintainers.  The maintainers' job is to
> get the program's maintenance done and follow GNU Project conventions.
>
> When we made Bzr a GNU package, I appointed Martin Pool as the
> maintainer.  He did the job well, but then he stopped.  So I appointed
> John Meinel as maintainer -- but he has not been doing what a
> maintainer is supposed to do.
>
> Thus, we need a new maintainer.

This was my first and most important point: we just need an individual to
work on it.

> This does not require Canonical to "hand off" anything.  It is fine if
> the maintainer works with Canonical, or works for Canonical as Martin
> did -- just as long as he does what a maintainer needs to do.

My second point was that there are some things about bzr that are coupled
to Canonical: both technical and administrative items. They are not an
immediate barrier to someone else becoming maintainer but they will need to
be considered at some point.

-m
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