Re: Some observations regardig the progress towards Debian 3.1

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de>]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 09:51:55PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 02:35:57AM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> 
> > The problem with your pragmatic approach is that every of your users has 
> > other packages he cares about. A package you care zero about might be 
> > the killer application for some users.
> 
> > This might not be a problem if it happens for one package, but if it 
> > happens for e.g. 500 packages the sum of people affected by at least one 
> > of these removals will be quite large.
> 
> > If someone wants to answer "But noone cared enough to fix this package!" 
> > now, he forgets that there is a distinction between developers and users 
> > of Debian.
> 
> Er, why point out the distinction between developers and users?  Are you
> now suggesting that we have an obligation to maintain any packages that
> users ask for, even when those packages are not of interest to *any*
> developers?


No, that would be the other extreme, and the optimum is in between.


If a package is not in stable only because the maintainer was MIA or he
didn't care enough, and therefore easy to fix RC bugs weren't fixed,
this doesn't harm the maintainer, it harms Debian.

Not every wish of a user for a package has to be fulfilled, and it's 
obviously correct to remove completely broken and/or obsolete packages.


My sentence might have sounded bit extreme, but this is a result of
seeing that some people on debian-release prefer suggesting to remove a
package from testing over notifying the maintainer that it doesn't build
on one architecture...


> Steve Langasek

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed