The Cat Model of Package Ownership
Debian has been moving away from strong ownership of packages by package maintainers and towards encouraging group maintainership, for very good reasons: single maintainers have a bad bus factor and a number of other disadvantages.
When single maintainership is changed into maintainership by a small , open group of people who can easily communicate and sync with each other, everything is just better: there is an easy way to gradually replace people who want to leave, but there is also no duplication of efforts (because communication is easy), there are means to always have somebody available for emergency work and generally package quality can only gain from it.
Unfortunately, having such group of maintainers for every package would require more people than are available and willing to work on it, and while I think it's worth doing efforts to have big and important packages managed that way, it may not be so for the myriad of small ones that make up the long tail of a distribution.
Many of those packages may end up being maintained in a big team such as the language-based ones, which is probably better than remaining with a single maintainer, but can lead to some problems.
My experience with the old OpenEmbedded, back when it was still using monotone instead of git and everybody was maintaining everything, however, leads me to think that this model has a big danger of turning into nobody maintains anything, because when something needs to be done everybody is thinking that somebody else will do it.
As a way to prevent that, I have been thinking in the general direction of a Cat Model of Package Ownership, which may or may not be a way to prevent some risks of both personal maintainership and big teams.
The basic idea is that the my in my packages is not the my in my toys , but the my in my Cat, to whom I am a servant .
As in the case of a cat, if my package needs a visit to the vet, it's my duty to do so. Other people may point me to the need of such a visit, e.g. by telling me that they have seen the cat leaving unhealty stools, that there is a bug in the package, or even that upstream released a new version a week ago, did you notice?, but the actual putting the package in a cat carrier and bringing it to the vet falls on me.
Whether you're allowed to play with or pet the cat is her decision, not mine, and giving her food or doing changes to the package is usually fine, but please ask first: a few cats have medical issues that require a special diet.
And like cats, sometimes the cat may decide that I'm not doing a good enough job of serving her, and move away to another maintainer; just remember that there is a difference between a lost cat who wants to go back to her old home and a cat that is looking for a new one. When in doubt, packages usually wear a collar with contact informations, trying to ping those is probably a good idea.
This is mostly a summer afternoon idea and will probably require some refinement, but I think that the basic idea can have some value. Comments are appreciated on the federated social networks where this post is being published, via email (valid addresses are on my website
http://www.trueelena.org/computers/articles/the_cat_model_of_package_ownership.html and on my GPG key
http://www.trueelena.org/about/gpg.html) or with a post on a blog that appears on planet debian
http://planet.debian.org/.
how small is small depends a lot on the size of the package, the amount of work it requires, how easy it is to parallelize it and how good are the people involved at communicating, so it would be quite hard to put a precise number here.
I've moved away from it because the boards I was using could run plain Debian, but I've heard that after the move to git there have been a number of workflow changes (of which I've seen the start) and everything now works much better.
TUG 2016 is over, and I have returned from a wonderful trip to Toronto and Maine. High time to release a new checkout of the TeX Live packages. After that I will probably need some time for another checkout, as there are a lot of plans on the table: upstream created a new collection, which means new package in Debian, which needs to go through NEW, and I am also planning to integrate tex4ht to give it an update. Help greatly appreciated here.
This package also sees the (third) revision of how config files for pdftex and luatex are structured, since then we have settled down. Hopefully this will close some of the issues that have appeared.
New packages
biblatex-ijsra, biblatex-nottsclassic, binarytree, diffcoeff, ecgdraw, fvextra, gitfile-info, graphics-def, ijsra, mgltex, milog, navydocs, nodetree, oldstandardt1, pdflatexpicscale, randomlist, texosquery
Updated packages
2up, acmart, acro, amsmath, animate, apa6, arabluatex, archaeologie, autobreak, beebe, biblatex-abnt, biblatex-gost, biblatex-ieee, biblatex-mla, biblatex-source-division, biblatex-trad, binarytree, bxjscls, changes, cloze, covington, cs, csplain, csquotes, csvsimple, datatool, datetime2, disser, dvipdfmx, dvips, emisa, epstopdf, esami, etex-pkg, factura, fancytabs, forest, genealogytree, ghsystem, glyphlist, gost, graphics, hyperref, hyperxmp, imakeidx, jadetex, japanese-otf, kpathsea, latex, lstbayes, luatexja, mandi, mcf2graph, mfirstuc, minted, oldstandard, optidef, parnotes, philosophersimprint, platex, protex, pst-pdf, ptex, pythontex, readarray, reledmac, sepfootnotes, sf298, skmath, skrapport, stackengine, sttools, tcolorbox, tetex, texinfo, texlive-docindex, texlive-es, texlive-scripts, thesis-ekf, tools, toptesi, tudscr, turabian-formatting, updmap-map, uplatex, uptex, velthuis, xassoccnt, ycbook.
Enjoy.
A maintenance release of 
Recently somebody reported that my 
The 
I'm pleased to announce that, at long last, the 
ChaosKey v1.0 Released USB Attached True Random Number Generator
ChaosKey, our random number generator that attaches via USB, is now
available for sale from the 
I've been funded for two years by the 
Debian LTS
July marked the fifteenth month I contributed to 
For a few years I did not attempt any serious task on the Amazon cloud. It
took me a bit of time to get back my automatisms and adapt myself to the
changes. In particular, the cheapest instances, 
A week has gone by and another small sharing about Doha and one package that quite a few of us use everyday but don t think much of them.
Let s start with Doha with these two pictures which tells/shares a bit about what the Doha of today is like
I do have some more stories about Qatar but that would have to wait for another day now. Also, I really don t want to talk much about this part as it s part depressing but probably would explore it a bit in a further blog-post.
One of the more interesting topics that I attended was the apt talk . There are 3-4 tools in the Debian world i.e. apt, aptitude, apt-get, dpkg and dselect. More often than not people know aptitude and apt-get whereas the rest of the packages are not thought so much about. What I somewhat suspected about the history of apt was revealed to be true 
This is a repost and update of my retirement letter sent privately to Debian last month, July 10, 2016. At that time I received many notes of appreciation and good wishes which I treasure. Now, I d like to say goodbye to the broader Debian community and, as well, indicate which of the cleanup items have since been addressed in strikethrough style and with annotations. Also, I d like to stay in touch with many of you, so I have added some comments oriented towards those of you who are interested in doing that 
Now, business. These things remain to clean up upon my departure, and I d appreciate help from QA, and anyone else who can lend a hand. My packages are effectively orphaned, but I haven t the time to do any of the cleanup myself, so please speak up if you can help.
