[Portland] xdg-utils upstream status (Re: Bug#514882: lintian: please remove the su-to-root check in desktop files)

[Jonathan Nieder]

Hi again,

Per Olofsson wrote in 2009-07-11[1]:

> OTOH, there seems to be no upstream maintainer at the moment.
> 
> One reason that I haven't uploaded the package in a while is that I am
> somewhat reluctant to add Debian-only patches to it. The whole point of
> xdg-utils is that it should provide a distro-neutral interface for doing
> stuff. It seems a bit pointless then to add Debian-specific interfaces.
> 
> There are already many patches in the Debian package. I once tried to
> get LyX's upstream to use xdg-open by default to open files, but it
> turns out that other distro's xdg-open are broken, so it didn't work.
> Now only the LyX in Debian (and derivs.) uses xdg-open.

This is a sad story and as far as I can tell the general story hasn’t
changed drastically (no new releases and files in CVS seem to be
changing very slowly).  The old X rule is

	The first person to complain about an unresponsive maintainer
	automatically assumes maintainership of the code in question.

so by that standard I guess one of us should just take up the mantle.
More realistically, do you think it would be reasonable to coordinate
with the other "large" distributions (Fedora, Gentoo, SuSe) to
maintain a cross-distro collection of patches until a more active
upstream develops?

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/514882