[$] Maintainerless Debian?

The maintainer model is deeply ingrained into the culture of thefree-software community; for any bit of code, there is usually a developer(or a small group of developers) charged with that code's maintenance.Good maintainers can help a project run smoothly, while poor maintainerscan run things into the ground. What is to be done to save a project withthe latter type of maintainer? Forking can be an option in some casesbut, in many others, it's not a practical alternative. The Debian projectis currently discussing its approach to bad maintainers - a discussion which has taken asurprising turn.