

Sponsored people

Joey asked how many sponsored people there are at the moment and since
I didn't know I asked Colin for an estimate.  Colin did a great job,
and came up with a list of 191 people.  While I (and he) thought this
was a high number, it's actually accurate (take or give a few).  Now I
wouldn't be surprised if some of those 191 people weren't active
anymore... I just wanted to mention this here to show that this is
actually a serious issue.  While I don't have time right now, I will
go through this list of people at some point to find inactive people
and orphan their packages.

In the meantime, I have added the following to the README in

Sponsored people who are inactive

A major problem are sponsored people are are inactive.  They are even
harder to pin down than inactive developers since no echelon information
is not available about them, their contact details are not available on
db.debian.org, etc.  One strategy which might be useful to find out about
their current status is to contact the developer who has actually uploaded
the package.  After all, they are responsible for the upload and should
know what happened to the person they sponsored.  Furthermore, one can
check http://nm.debian.org and see the status of the person in the NM
process.  The site also lists the Application Manager of the applicant and
he might have more information.

One problem is that there is no list of sponsored people.  Colin Watson
has used the following scripts as a starting point to find sponsored

  grep-available -rFMaintainer -nsMaintainer . > maintainers

  (gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring ./debian-keyring.gpg --list-keys; \
   gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring ./debian-keyring.pgp --list-keys) \
    | grep -v '^\[.*\]$' | grep . | sort -u > keyring-maintainers

  perl -e 'open K, "keyring-maintainers";
           while (<K>) { $k{$_} = 1; }
           close K;
           open M, "maintainers";
           while (<M>) { print unless $k{$_}; }
           close M;' > sponsored-maintainers

However, this is only an approximation.  It's still necessary to go through
the file by hand and remove the ones who use different e-mail addresses from
the ones in their GPG keys.  Thus, most of the work is weeding through the
sponsored-maintainers file and comparing it more intelligently to
keyring-maintainers.  Once a current listing of sponsored people has been
made with this method, one can start checking the status of all sponsored
people against http://nm.debian.org/ and see who's left, or which applicants
who are "on hold" in the NM process have packages in the archive.

Martin Michlmayr

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