Re: Debian derivatives census: removing old patches
On Sun, Jan 13, 2019 at 10:50 AM Paul Wise wrote:
> So the idea is to keep changed packages that might be useful to Debian
> package maintainers, so they can incorporate the changes into Debian
> or fix the issues found by derivatives in a different way. So we
> should keep patches/packages that have a chance of being useful and
> remove the other ones.
Since there hasn't been any feedback from other folks yet, I have a
few more thoughts that I should share:
There should probably be a "just-in-case-we-need-it" delay of say one
year before packages/patches are expired.
We should keep all patches/packages from derivatives that are marked
as inactive, because the derivative's apt repository could disappear
at any time.
When packages are detected as merged into Debian, the files in the
sha1-farm directory get turned into symlinks but I think the patches
do not get removed.
We could remove all packages that are marked as not being derived from
any past or present Debian package (the sources.new files) since those
are not derived from Debian packages and thus could only be useful to
people making new packages rather than people maintaining existing
packages. We do need a way to expose those new packages to people
making new packages but that will not require storing a copy of them
on Debian infrastructure (except maybe for inactive derivatives).
There could be a mechanism for Debian maintainers to mark patches as
merged, they could be removed.
I think in order to get the expiry enabled by default, I think we want
at least the expiry delay and the keeping of inactive derivatives
implemented.
In order to get some more feedback from a wider audience, once we have
a clearer picture of what we want to expire, we could take that to the
debian-devel mailing list.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
Reply to: