One weakness of the Debian project is the possibility that key packages can get virtually abandoned by their maintainers without anyone immediately taking care of this.

The Q&A team follows this as much as possible and can ring bells when some key packages are mostly abandoned.

However, the Q&A team cannot maintain all such packages.

This talk will summarize the experience accumulated while taking over the "shadow" package which provides the "login" and "passwd" binary packages which are installed on all Debian systems.

Some experience gained by the author while working on the samba package will also be used in this talk.

The talk will focus on organizing team work, on simple tools and methods that can be used to bring an abandoned package to a better state. Interaction with upstream both intechnical and "social" terms will also be discussed to show how the shadow and samba package maintenance teams reached the Grail of bringing and keeping their packages in a sane health.