Proposed removal of libtext-query-perl (also: libtext-query-sql-perl, gpsdrive-scripts)
Hi all:
Recently I have spent some time adopting libtext-query-perl under the
Debian Perl Group umbrella, see BTS#547244. After cleaning everything
up and preparing it for release, it turns out that the package fails
its own tests rather catastrophically -- and this can be seen on the
CPAN Testers page too.
I am nominating libtext-query-perl for removal from Debian, for the
following reasons:
1. It currently fails to build with tests enabled (the package in
Debian right now, not maintained within the group get, but orphaned by
its original maintainer, gets around this by simply skipping the
tests)
2. Test failures are not a Debian-specific issue, either, and I don't
think it can be fixed without some substantial patches; CPAN Testers
reports PASS (61) FAIL (84) UNKNOWN (1). We are getting errors
similar to: http://www.cpantesters.org/cpan/report/5711283 -- and I'm
sure many of these other reports are the same:
http://www.cpantesters.org/show/Text-Query.html#Text-Query-0.07
3. The last upstream release was in 1999 (over ten years ago...)
4. The package has no maintainer (I am willing to step in to adopt the
package, but without any active upstream this seems like a bad idea)
5. There have been 3 open bugs in the upstream request tracker (well,
four, but one is duplicate) for over two years:
https://rt.cpan.org/Dist/Display.html?Name=Text-Query
6. Popcon score for libtext-query-perl is pretty high - 510 installed,
76 vote. This is probably due to it being a dependency of gpsdrive,
which has a popcon of 530 installed, 91 vote. It should be noted that
libtext-query-sql-perl (the other package which depends on
Text::Query, and written by the same upstream author) has a
significantly lower popcon score.
The big problem with this proposed removal is that it would also mean
that its reverse-dependencies, libtext-query-sql-perl and
gpsdrive-scripts would also need to be removed. This consequently
means the removal of gpsdrive, or otherwise working around the
dependency appropriately.
Considering gpsdrive is using such awful, unmaintained software, which
was updated 10+ years ago, perhaps this is also time to consider
removal of that package.
Otherwise, our best option seems to be disabling the tests for now,
and continuing to support libtext-query-perl in Debian.
I'm curious what the group thinks of this. Not being a gpsdrive user
myself, I am leaning toward removal of this obviously faulty software
from Debian, though I can see the case for keeping it on the grounds
of it being useful to a large number of users. If we want to keep it,
the quickest option for now is to disable tests.
Another option is to ask the gpsdrive maintainers if it would be
possible to move away from Text::Query, but not having seen their
codebase, I'm not sure this is possible or desirable.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Reply to: