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I just posted a message to debian-devel asking for volunteers to take over most of the maintenance work for dovecot. I had already given up webmin and related packages and most of my perl packages to projects on Alioth. This means I am now the sole maintainer of only two minor perl modules in the official Debian distribution.

This hardly means I'm retiring though. I am still involved and in fact plan to increase my work in the YaST for Debian and Debian-IN projects. Theres' some documentation I'm interested in doing, and some work for DebConf 5. And I still intend to remain involved in my former packages. (For webmin, I'm still the de-facto maintainer.)

This year Linuxworld is moving from New York to Boston. If you are local to the Boston area and you would like to help out at the booth, let me know and join the debian-events-na@lists.debian.org mailing list.

If you would like to help maintain the Debian webmin and usermin packages which I orphaned a couple of month ago, get an account on alioth and let me know so I can add you to the pkg-webmin project. You don't have to be a developer but a good knowledge of perl will help as that is what this software is written in. A mailing list has also been set up for coordinating maintenence.

I threaten to do this every now and again but now I've finally done it. I've orphaned all my webmin/usermin packages. Why now? It's not that I have bad relations with the upstream maintainer. On the contrary Jamie has been very helpul and responsive to Debian needs. It's not the users. As far as I can tell webmin is very popular and the users I've talked to have been very appreciative of my work. It's not the code itself. Although webmin for portability and compatability reasons is written a very grotty subset of perl, I get it and can work with it.

No I'm just losing interest in it for reason I can't quite put my finger on. Lately I've had to struggle to summon up the enthusiasm to work on it particularly because there are several other things I'd like to do for Debian--particularly Debian-IN. I decided that it is not fair to the author, users or myself to let the packages rot. So I fixed a bunch of bugs, uploaded the latest versions, and let them go.

Until proper new maintainers are found I do intend to keep an eye on the packages so they don't deteriorate too badly. For instance as soon as the current packages migrate to testing, I'll do another release to fix an RC bug and add some upstream bugfixes. But hopefully someone (or a group) will step up and take over.

While packaging the latest webmin version I had an interesting time trying to figure out how to do stuff to files with names like config-*-linux. The trouble is '*' gets interpreted as a wildcard character. Normally in bash on the commandline to get a literal '*' you would just do this: config-\*-linux. But in a makefile, it gets converted to config-\\*-linux. Increasing the number of slashes was suggested but to no avail. The correct answer is $$'config-*-linux' (You have to use two dollar signs so it doesn't get interpreted as a make variable.)

• Added restricted architecture field to control file to prevent buildds from screwing up. (Closes: #228457)
• webmin-bind: Only suggest bind as this package doesn't necessarily require it to be installed locally. (Closes: #223922)

• webmin-samba: depends on webmin-inetd or webmin-xinetd (Closes: #226802)
• webmin-ldap-useradmin: Added missing dependencies on webmin-core (Closes: #225478]) and libnss-ldap (Closes: [http://bugs.debian.org/225478)
• webmin-quota: Made sure package is properly configured for Debian. Thanks Bozhan Boiadzhiev even though I didn't directly use his suggestion. (Closes: #228069)

If you haven't seem much stuff here lately, it is because it has been really, really cold around here the past few days and I got sick. No fever or anything just felt really lethargic and slept a lot.

I'm slowly getting back up to speed with my Debian stuff. I did new releases of libmail-sendmail-perl and my unofficial pine packages Some of the webmin stuff too.

The only major service not covered by webmin is the Exim mail server. Luckily Alexandre Mathieu has created one. If he wants to become a Debian developer I'll sponsor his package or upload it myself.