Hi, On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 21:54 +0900, Paul Wise wrote: > unsupported.d.n could be the right place for packages that are "not > good enough for Debian (yet)". It could be a good place to merge > packages removed from Debian for having no users (or whatever), > uploaded to Ubuntu, Nexenta, Preventa, mentors, revu and any other > Debian-based distros that have public archives. A while ago on -devel > there was a post about automatic creation of rough packages using > automatic software discovery and AI techniques for the packaging, such > packages could be uploaded to unsupported. Upstreams often make Debian > packages but don't upload them anywhere, unsupported could be a place > for them. I've often wanted to package some cool software (see the > list on my wiki page), but not maintain it forever, so I didn't bother > and just moved on. Instead I could just upload to unsupported. As I see it, unsupported would be: * packages excluded from main for whatever reason (think: GTK1, XMMS), * packages not yet "good enough" for main (or not yet sponsored, uploading to mentors could automatically put built packages in unsupported, for example.), * packages that someone made, but does not want to maintain, * community maintained (e.g. you could bump the version by uploading to mentors, or uploading directly to unsupported if you are a DD/DM), * and most importantly _UNSUPPORTED_. That said, provided that it's clear that it's _UNSUPPORTED_, it could become an additional asset for Debian users. The community maintainance concept has proven to be quite reasonable, other projects have had great success with this sort of thing, think ArchLinux's AUR, Gentoo's "Sunrise" Overlay, etcetera. Yes, some person can upload an evil package, but with proper moderation, evil packages can be dealt with in a timely manner. Did I mention that it is unsupported? William
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