Re: Work-needing packages report for Sep 6, 2002
On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Sep 2002 16:55, Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists wrote:
> > On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 03:18:38PM +0200, tomas p wrote:
> > > > I understand. Which brings me back to the proposition I made before.
> > > > Wouldn't it be better to just have some kind of way to _tag_
> > > > unmaintained packages, so that f.ex. QA can look at the package and
> > > > then just decide: "this is not an important package, we'll not bother
> > > > with it" and leave in unstable without paying any more attention to
> > > > it. Similary for Junichi Uekawa who could just say: "I'm not building
> > > > unmaintained packages".
> > >
> > > I think we're trying to build a quality distribution, not just a pile of
> > > stuff. I'd rather see a package be removed than stop maintaining it even
> > > in QA.
> >
> > So you'd remove the package, even if people are using it and are that far
> > happy with it?
>
> The hypothetical example was given of a package not needing any changes for a
> period of 6 years.
Where was 6 years mentioned?
> If a package was useful and didn't need maintaining then some developer
> would probably adopt it and forget it.
The fact is that it does not happen.
I did NMU gnobog and afbackup that were both unmaintained for an estimated
time of 2 years.
Both had open bugs, both were usable. I liked them and did some NMUs.
> I expect that I'm not the only developer who can't even remember the list of
> packages they maintain. Some packages don't have any new versions or any bug
> reports so I just forget them until someone reports a bug.
>
> Why is this so difficult?
Apparently it is. Nobody steps up to maintain those packages. There's
nothing more you can do about it than either bringing some people to
maintain all unmaintained packages (which will not happen) or maintaining
them all yourself (which will not happen either) or Debian throwing them
out (goodbye nice and usable software) or plain accepting the fact that
there are unmaintained packages in Debian.
*t
--
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Tomas Pospisek
SourcePole - Linux & Open Source Solutions
http://sourcepole.ch
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Tel: +41 (81) 330 77 11
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