[pkg-ntp-maintainers] Who's in charge? :)

[Christoph Haas]

Evening...

Bear with me if my mail suprises or even offends someone. It's really
not intended to do so. Perhaps I'm even completely wrong here.
Originally I thought that the "ntp" (source) package was orphaned. I'm
referring to the posting on debian-devel by Matthias Urlichs saying:

=============
My inability to find enough time to focus on package maintainance
has been *way* too persistent. I therefore need to give up my packages
for adoption, for the time being.

I am sorry (and not happy with myself) that I've been procrastinating
about this for too long. This decision has not been easy. However,
I need to focus more on (a) work that actually feeds my kids, and
(b) time that is *not* spent hacking.

Before filing Orphan bugs, I'd like to ask whether anybody wants to
tackle these packages. The Easy Pickings stuff would be ideal start-up
work for new maintainers / mentorship; some of the others do need some
work.

[...]

* NTP server
  (some work required; currently, not-really-maintained by the Debian
  NTP Team, which consists of zero active members)
=============

So I replied and accepted to adopt the package.

Yesterday I found out that there is already an alioth project and mailed
Peter Eisentraut. He kindly replied that the alioth project is still
very active and that I'm invited to participate.

Actually I'm pretty surprised. I share Matthias' opinion that the
package indeed needs some work and is not really maintained. The last
upload has been a year ago. There is a huge pile of bugs (127!) - even a
grave one perhaps keeping it out of Etch. And multiple NMUs in between.

I started to work on a better package making proper use of debhelper,
working on the build process etc. It's a lot of work so I'm not yet done
with it. I even tried to upgrade to the 4.2.2p2 upstream version and
found out that it has a bug preventing it from building the "sntp"
component. So I stuck to 4.2.2.

So are we talking about the same "ntp" package here? Or what did I miss?
What is the status of the alioth project. Has it been a joke that the
package was up for adoption? Is Matthias just a member who stepped back?
Has Matthias been the maintainer or is this a group effort? I really
don't mean to interfere if the package is already worked on. Just wanted
to keep it from dying when I read his posting. I've enough on my todo
stack so if anyone else is seriously working on it I don't really want
to step forward.

Heavy number of bugs:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=ntp

Not much activity except June 2006:

http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/ntp.html
(1:4.2.0a+stable-9? Why 'stable'? Have there been security bugs?)

Perhaps I get some enlightenment soon. :) Thanks.

Kindly...

 Christoph