Hacker News Reader

Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I mean that the volunteer maintainer of the latexmk package in Debian hasn't updated it since 2015. Arch probably has a newer version from the latexmk authors (and I think Arch does not have the same culture of individual package maintainers, in general).

View on HN

Just to note: in Arch we almost only have individual package maintainers.

..Oh. Wow. Do distros not care if their packages are updated for 3+ years? I'd have expected half their entire job is to make sure package maintainers are actually maintaining packages...

I don't know who these "distros" people are. Humans care. But no humans cared-enough to update this earlier. If you want to contribute to the Debian project specifically, talk to me.

Eventually such packages get removed (usually when they stop building for whatever reason). But if the package still works, having an old version of it is still better than not having anything.

The Debian LaTeX maintainer was essentially harassed out of the project by the Anti-Harassment Team.

Source?

The horse's mouth: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2018/12/msg00032.htm...

Downvoters: If you're honest, then do your homework instead of downvoting. If you're dishonest, and you're trying to cover it up, shame on you--you're as bad as the abusers in Debian.

This is 1) irrelevant, he was not the maintainer for latexmk (in fact he did some non-maintainer uploads very recently for it to update it to the latest version), and 2) not true, he was not "harassed out of the project," he was removed by formal action. I read "harassed out" as "pressured into quitting" or something. He didn't quit under pressure; his account was removed. (And he's still a Debian Maintainer, same status as me.)

> he was not "harassed out of the project," he was removed by formal action.

Ah, yes, the standard bureaucratic cover for abuse: retroactively justify it with formal committee action, by asking people to submit examples of badthink and badspeak from years ago:

		2012: 1 email
		2013: 7 emails
		2014: 5 emails
		2015: 1 email
		2016: 0 emails
		2017: 2 emails
		2018: 2 emails

Nothing wrong with that at all. Nothing to see here! Debian's a perfectly healthy project. Continue on your way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com