24.04 courier-imap package issue / hole in ubuntu-bug reporting strategies?

[Robie Basak]

Thank you for caring for these packages in Ubuntu!

This mailing list is the correct place to ask for help on this,
particularly because it's about the availability of entire packages
rather than individual bugs in an existing package, as you point out.

Some misconceptions to address first.

1. *All* packages in Ubuntu are team maintained. Ubuntu does not have
individual package maintainers. Please do not single out any individual
and demand work from them, or expect any individual response from anyone
specific. That's not fair on them. Instead, please use communication
that doesn't exclude other interested Ubuntu developers (for example,
using this mailing list is fine!).

2. It's not "Canonical" you need to reach here. Packages in universe in
Ubuntu are maintained by whoever volunteers to do so[1]. The Ubuntu MOTU
team is responsible for guiding this in general but makes no commitments
about specific packages.

Therefore, to make progress, someone needs to volunteer to provide the
required technical analysis, specific packaging fix and any associated
necessary QA. It may be that there are no volunteers, in which case
there would unfortunately be no "right person to reach" at all.

If you can volunteer, then I suggest you start by figuring out the exact
set of packaging changes necessary to fix your problem. Since 24.04 is
already released, this needs to be of minimal impact to any existing
users, so there are some limitations - for example it would in general
be inappropriate to make feature changes to packages where those
packages _are_ already functional, such as updating existing working
packages to a new upstream major version. To minimise regression risk
and to make it practical to review, the changes you make should be the
minimum required to fix the issue.

Since it sounds like there are multiple packages involved, I suggest you
put the packages in a PPA to demonstrate what is needed to be changed in
Ubuntu and that they do fix the problem. If this turns out to be
complex, feel free to ask more specific technical questions so you don't
spend too much effort on a path that wouldn't be acceptable to Ubuntu.

There are other steps involved but I suggest you start there, since
without this, no progress can be made anyway. Once this is ready, others
on this list should be able to help further on getting those PPA changes
landed in Ubuntu itself.

If you need real time help, you can ask in #ubuntu-devel on Freenode.

I hope that helps!

Robie

[1] Canonical provides Ubuntu Pro that includes security maintainence
for packages in universe, but that's not relevant here.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20241128/470415fc/attachment.sig>