On Fri, 2012-07-20 at 09:05 +0200, Jonathan Bohren wrote: > On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 2:00 AM, Geoffrey > Biggs wrote: ... > ROS is old enough now that there are a lot of packages, even > wg-spawned packages, whose owners have moved on to other things. I'm > talking from experience on this, since I recently tried to fix what I > considered a serious flaw in a wg-hosted package, only to find that > the names listed in the package manifest are no longer the maintainers > and the person listed in the stack manifest is (understandably) too > busy to deal with my patch. I find myself blocked, and I could fork > it, but this package is currently distributed with the debian packages > and I think creating a new package with a new name will just lead to > confusion and fragmentation. I have had similar experiences waiting for patches to land. For part of this, I think there needs to be a clearer process for gaining commit access or forking for "core" ros packages. While it doesn't solve the documentation issue, Debian has an interesting approach with the idea of a "Request for adoption" http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/ http://wnpp.debian.net/ Perhaps another approach would be for maintainers to avoid/remove namespace conflicts for unmaintained packages. ie. linefollower -> mylab_linefollower -- Bill Morris I Heart Engineering http://www.iheartengineering.com <3