Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] [gnu.org #1231910] Ggradebook

[Karl Berry]

    Norbert de Jonge (the original author of GNU gradebook) is unable to
    update the project's Savannah repo because he is not a member of the
    project -- his request for inclusion hasn't been processed yet. In
    fact, the former project admin is "inactive". 
    Could you possibly add him manually?

Well, since Norbert is the original author of the package, ok, I went in
and added him.

But ordinarily this would not be acceptable.  Ggradebook has a listed
maintainer, namely Peter Cherepanov (cc'd; hope you don't mind me doing
this, Peter). We have no way to know he is "inactive", if in fact he is.
There is nothing in general that delegates tasks like membership
approval from the maintainer(s) to Savannah admins; that would not be right.

The place to which to escalate problems is address@hidden Those
are the people who have volunteered to sort out problems like
this. (Like, try to contact Peter, see if he replies, remove him from
the maintainers file if appropriate, decide about doing a manual
approval, ask about becoming a (co-)maintainer, etc.)

    > approval process does not take into account that GNU projects can be
    > orphaned/unmaintained. 

Ggradebook is not orphaned/unmaintained, as far as the official file
goes, so fixes for that (which would not be bad) wouldn't help here.

    > cron-job checks which inclusion requests have been active for more than
    > two weeks or so. 

Agreed, it would be nice. There are a plethora of nice ideas, and
evidently zero volunteers with time and interest in implementing such
things. Sad, but that's the reality I observe. (Unfortunately I am of
those not-enough-time-and-interest-to-do-real-work people too.) Maybe
more dedicated volunteers will come forward one day. --best, karl.