Hi everyone, during the past months i have started to adopt orphaned packages which i personally found worthwhile to work on and to keep in Debian. I also discovered some packages which were abandoned by the Games Team back in 2009, e.g [1]. Obviously the intention had been to remove these games completely from Debian after three months, but that has never happened. This made me wonder whether it would be a good idea to create some kind of site map, perhaps a wiki page, which keeps track of all those orphaned games. Going even further i think we should not only keep track of games which were maintained by the Games Team but of all games which are currently unmaintained and revise the list at least once in a year. In fact not many orphaned packages are games thus i think the effort is small. My reasons for this proposal are: * If the Games Team doesn't care about games, it's unlikely that others in Debian will. Hence these games will rot in the archive. * Nobody else can better assess whether a game is interesting enough and worthy to stay in Debian than the Team which focusses on games. * QA-work is not the sole responsibility of the QA-Team. If we decide to orphan games and nobody has taken care of them within a certain amount of time (i think one release cycle = 2 years is more than enough), then they should be removed from Debian immediately. I think the following games fail because they were all orphaned a long time ago, are outdated, visually unpleasing and even worse, boring. If we can find a consensus about these games on the list, i suggest to delegate the issue to the QA-Team who in turn could file a request for removal. Or we could do the same ourselves. XBattle ======= Last upload was in 2008. Upstream is dead since 1996. The game looks very outdated and makes it unnecessarily difficult to play it. XBoing ====== Last upload 2008. Upstream is dead since 1996. Actually unusable and won't even start because of some font/sound bugs. shisen.app ========== Last upload 2008. There are a lot of shisen/mahjongg alternatives available. The gnustep migration will cause additional work. stepbill.app ============ Outdated. Last upload 2008. Boring gameplay and design. The yeah button didn't work.. Gnustep migration will cause additional work. battleball ========== Old and ugly. Unintuitive gameplay. Last upload 2008. Xchain ====== The package seems to be in a good shape, last QA upload was in 2011. The game itself looks outdated but is not as bad as the aforementioned ones. I would remove it from unstable, but keep it in Wheezy. Xbomb ===== Another minesweeper clone. Looks very outdated. The package is in a good shape. Last QA upload was in 2012. I would remove it from unstable and keep it in Wheezy. XTux ==== Should Xtux be a dropper? [2] Yes, i think so. Ok it's some kind of linux classic but honestly we should finally let it go. What's your opinion? Regards, Markus [1] http://bugs.debian.org/544926 [2] http://bugs.debian.org/538269
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