I've been intermittently prodding at the Debian release-critical bug list for some time, but inspired by Zack and Tim I've decided to start keeping track, if only for my own interest.
Monday: openipmi Debian bug #474087 + patch (not uploaded since I have no way to test IPMI libraries, not having the appropriate hardware...)
Monday: potential candidates for removal:
- skyutils (RC bug, library with no reverse dependencies since smssend was removed in 2008)
- libhid (RC bug, RFA since August 2008, mainly exists to support libphidgets)
- libphidgets (RC bug, RFA since 2007)
- libnoise (RC bug, library with no reverse dependencies or popcon votes)
Thursday: hercules Debian bug #553110 uploaded to DELAYED/7, with various bonus changes including making the copyright file sufficient to satisfy Policy §12.5
Friday: spider Debian bug #537631 fixed by a QA upload, fast-forwarding through 8 years of Debian policy and upgrading from debhelper 3 (!) to 7 in the process
In general I've been trying to avoid resurrecting packages that I don't think should be in the archive, even if the fix is trivial. I'm not sure whether that applies to spider; according to popcon, it still has a substantial number of users, so it may be worth keeping even if there are no upstream releases (also, it amused me to convert such an old package to Debhelper 7 and dpkg source format v3).
In the process I've discovered that git-buildpackage makes a great NMU tool. I'll probably be putting all future NMU diffs in my users/smcv directory on git.debian.org (at least until the maintainer acknowledges or rejects the NMU), just because it's a convenient way to give the maintainer a nice queue of individual changes rather than a monolithic diff; if any maintainers decide they'll use git as a result, that's a bonus :-)