There were some discussions on -private (and possibly here?) earlier in the year about quality vs quantity of packages. It should be clear to most developers that our many packages are not all equal in quality; nor are all maintainers. Not everyone is aware that packages in a stable release may have serious known bugs - even security bugs - that won't get fixed because of overstretched or MIA developers, or lack of upstream support. There is a trade-off between quantity and quality of packages in the archive, and Debian is not as selective as many other distributions. I don't think we want to start grading maintainers and I believe there's a consensus that we should not be more selective about packages, but I think it would be a service to our users to grade how well supported packages are. I have a number of ideas for ways in which this could be done, but I think a discussion would yield something better that might eventually be accepted cover a whole release. So there will be a BoF at DebConf about this. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part