Hi all, I directly mailed all the people that I'm aware are involved in Common Lisp packaging for Debian to be sure they read this mail (which is quite long). Don't take this mail as personal: this is just an attempt to improve the current CL-Debian project. 1) Since Oct 4th, Alioth supports also darcs as VCS [1]. This means that we can move all the darcs maintained packages [2] to the commond darcs infrastructure, which is managed as explained at [3]: http://darcs.debian.org/$GROUP/$PACKAGE I'll start to move my packages as soon as the others keypoint expressed below are cleared. 2) AFAIK, at least three different VCSs are used for CL-Debian stuffs: bzr, darcs and git (this one especially by Kevin). Moreover, Pierre has prepared his packages using mercurial [4]. For this reason, I think that we should ask for a $GROUP folder in all of the VCSs we use, similar to the collab-maint project [5]. In this regard, I don't think we should restrict the number of VCSs we use: obviously, having only one VCS would be easier to learn and maintain, but whenever it's possible I prefer to follow upstream, providing that they use a distributed VCS. For example, all of my packages are in darcs: the upstream BESE ones [6] are in darcs, too, while the others upstream are in CVS. However, since StumpWM recently moved to git [7], I'm planning to follow that move for the Debian package as well, leaving darcs in favor of git. 3) During a private discussion between Peter and me, one idea that came out was to go for co-maintenance of the CL-Debian packages. Thus, all the people involved in the project (and registered in the Alioth group) would have write permission to all repositories within the group. This doesn't mean that the packages will be automagically and suddenly co-maintained by all of us, but that there's still a principal maintainer, while the others can sparely act on the package in case of urgency or small fixes. To achieve this goal, the Maintainer: field in debian/control will contain the mailing list address (see point 5 below), while the principal maintainer (with all the others involved) will end up in the Uploaders: field. In case someone would argue against this action and would preserve full control over his packages, I think that implementing a partial co-maintenance will be anyway worth it, so point 5 below stands in any case. 4) A further step in co-maintenance would be to allow write permission to DDs outside the CL-Debian project, in a way similar to the collab-maint one, as Stefano explained at [8]. This could be really useful for translators, for example. 5) Whatever we decide about a full or partial co-maintenance and since we're moving to 100% Alioth, we should move the mailing list as well. Doing so, we should decide if we want to keep the current project name or change it to something similar to other packaging groups. The latter includes pkg-commonlisp (or pkg-cl or what else) or simply Common Lisp team (thus common-lisp as the project name). Always WRT the mailing list, we can also ask for a commit mailing list, where all the commit to the different package archives will be automatically posted. Would it be useful? 6) While searching for all the people/groups involved in Common Lisp and Debian, I found that clc (the Common Lisp Controller) has its own Alioth project [9]. Should it be incorporated into the CL-Debian group instead? I hope to have missed nothing and I'm waiting for comments and suggestions. Thx, bye, Gismo / Luca Footnotes: [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/10/msg00002.html [2] http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/repositories/ [3] http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/darcs [4] http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/cl-debian/2007-September/002836.html [5] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/collab-maint/ [6] http://common-lisp.net/project/bese/ [7] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/stumpwm-devel/2007-09/msg00003.html [8] http://www.bononia.it/~zack/blog//posts/2007/08/DD_wide_commit_on_alioth.htm... [9] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/clc/