Re: Move proftpd to contrib
On Fri, Sep 17, 1999 at 07:52:24AM -0700, David Bristel wrote:
> Or a new section for packages removed from main due to bugs, but possibly
> still desired by some people? It's safer to have a clear message that
> "Debian considers these packages to contain too many bugs for inclusion in
> the main distribution, but we are aware that there are some who want to
> use these packages anyway." Something like this would eliminate any blame
> if people use those buggy packages, and then have their systems crash or
> go unstable, or get hacked. Any opinions?
>
I would fear it would come across like were pointing fingers at
bad software developers in the community, as though we were putting a
package on probation for being too buggy. I don't think our goal is to
seperate good software from bad software.
It might be within our scope to publish bugs per code lines per
year statistics or other hard number observations to make that decision
easier for others, and possibly avoid dependencies on software that has
too high a ratio of bugs to code lines or some other weighted but
objective comparision. A good bug vector would also give credit to
software more widely deployed (1 in every X persons sees a bug in package
Y every Z months).
Our goal is in a general sense to make free sofware easier to
install, use, and maintain. If that software has problems, it's not
our place to single it out. At most it might be worthwhile to help
identify where more developer effort needs to go, but if we don't have
the resources to devote that effort, it could be harmful to point fingers.
-Robert
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