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Should we divide Debian to usable and unusable



I've seen many unusable programs be announced as ITP, what use is it
for the normal user to have something that you cannot use.

Yes, i use Mozilla, which is considered mostly unusable, and many other
developement softwares.

although.. 
we have 1371 pre 1.0 packages, against 5309 packages total..
(approx 25%)

ofcourse, these are according my apt sources, and these may vary. but
still as 1.0 is generally referred as the first public release. these
figures should (on the public release) be much lower.

i also know that some 50% of this software is generally seen as stable
and usable, but for a newcomer it's not that clear.

while watching the announcements on Freshmeat we see a LOT of 0.0.0Alpha
releases which shouldn't be announced at all. same here, IMHO anyone
can make a package of main(){} but it should be kept as a private apt
source and it should be used from there.. and not uploaded to the main
archives and just comment it as, 

'it's a program that doesn this and that, it's not fully working yet,
actually you can't use it for anything yet, but i still packaged it and
sent it.'

this is a bit extreme example, but sometimes it just looks this way.

(the commands used to extract these numbers were:
 grep-dctrl -r -s Package . /opt/apt/state/lists/* \
   | sort | uniq | wc -l
 grep-dctrl -r -s Package -F Version ^0.\[\[:digit:\]\] \
   /opt/apt/state/lists/* | sort | uniq | wc -l
 )

Regards, Sami Haahtinen



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