Debian Packages That Need Lovin'

holy shit, order by installs, Apache and sudo have no maintainers

Anyone else disturbed by this? These packages have root access for millions of computers and thousands of Fortune 500 companies and no one is maintaining them?

If you sort by Installs this is kind of disturbing.

A lot of well known packages (Apache2 / OpenSSL / LibreOffice etc.) have no owner?

https://wnpp.debian.net/?sort=installs%2Fdesc&page=1

I think packages listed as “RFH” aren’t unmaintained really, just requesting for help maintaining it. Clicking-through on e.g. grub2 shows a mailing list thread requesting for help from…2004. grub2 has certainly received updates in Debian since then.

I have been using Debian on and off since the late 90s, including some time creating packages. It was wonderful to be able to install a recent, working version of pretty much anything you wanted for the vast majority of that time.

More recently, so many things I want to use are not available as a reasonably up-to-date package. Some examples are hugo and eclipse, where the versions provided are unusably ancient.

https://lwn.net/Articles/842319/

Meanwhile, more and more software is actively hostile to packaging / distributions, and things seem to have devolved into grabbing things from random github repos, or various dedicated/language-specific package managers like npm, pip, brew, ...

It's definitely annoying, seems like a step backwards, and its not clear to me whether there's some better distro i could be using, whether some funding / volunteer time could help, or the world has just "moved on" (backwards...) from the idea of a linux distribution with reasonably stable, up-to-date packages that "just work" for basic infrastructure so you can spend your time developing on your own project, instead of with the tedium of fetching and installing software and managing version compatibility problems yourself.