Ubuntu

What to do if one believes a maintainer has abandoned their responsibilities?

Asked by Wise Melon

I noticed a while ago that WireShark in the Ubuntu universe repository is seemingly not being maintained any more as a new version hasn't been released there for it in ages making me start to think that its maintainer has abandoned it. I think this for the following reasons mostly:

- V2 has been released yet only V1 is available there at the moment
- V1 and V2 had major security vulnerabilities patches several months ago, however the WireShark in the repository has not yet been updated with the patches and seems to be quite an old version of V1

So what do I do in such a case? How do I report this and either get the maintainer to get their act together again or for a new maintainer to be found?

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Expired
For:
Ubuntu Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#1

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wireshark shows that the new Ubuntu releases provide updated versions of wireshark. So I assume that the nominated maintainer(s) are doing their work.

If you expect that also older Ubuntu releases (like precise or trusty) would automatically receive updated version of wireshark - then you should read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates to understand why that is not the case.

The wireshark developer team has a PPA with backports of the current stable release:
https://launchpad.net/~wireshark-dev/+archive/ubuntu/stable

Maybe you can use the software from that PPA.

If the wireshark versions delivered for older supported Ubuntu release have severe bugs, then you might create a bug report, to request that the newer versions are also provided in the older Ubuntu releases (e.g. via an SRU or by a backport of the newest version).

Revision history for this message
Wise Melon (wise-melon-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#2

The versions I was looking at were Wily and Xenial. I have been using the official WireShark PPA as the latest version wasn't provided in the repositories. Ok, I will take your advise about filing a bug report with them.

But in a more general case, if I thought a package really had been abandoned and it had been, or that the maintainers of a package were in some way neglecting their duties, how would I report that (there is another package I am worried, not just WireShark, and specifically now I am talking about another package as we sort of sorted the WireShark thing out)?

Revision history for this message
Manfred Hampl (m-hampl) said : 		#3

To be honest, I do not know.
Debian has some kind of "Missing in Action" handling for such case https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/MIA but I am not aware of a similar group for Ubuntu.

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#4

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.