Re: Preparing a Proposal: 3 DD needed for every NEW package

[Juha Jäykkä <juolja@utu.fi>]

> Add also that packages can reach their End-Of-Life time.

  Assuming the package has no real bugs (that is, it is still usable
with the bugs it has), when will it reach its end-of-life time? I
would say it only reaches it when no one uses it any more. As long as
there is even a single user, the package is alive. This is again one of
Debian's advantages: you still have that old good software packaged in
the official distribution although it is no longer fancy and sexy.
SuSE, for example, does not have, which is bad. (No offence to SuSE,
but I have not touched any other distribution than Debian and SuSE
for a couple of years.)
  I do not think there is any reason to remove such packages. We
should, and I think this is what the original posting did, discuss
packages which have important bugs AND are poorly maintained (i.e.
important bugs not being fixed or upstream not followed) or abandoned
(i.e. the maintainer is mia or upstream has abandoned it). If the
package is still usable, there is no reason to remove it. Adding a
field like "Deprecated: Rather use package-X" or putting them in Extra
could help people to find alternatives if they do not want these
oldies.

> So, no more upstream maintainer(s), no more active development and more valid
> alternatives to them. This is unfortunately true for so much pkgs.

  This is exactly what I want to oppose. If a package is no longer
developed, what is wrong with it? I suppose ls or rm have not
been developed for a while but are still very useful. (I admit, they
are not packages, but they are valid examples: even though the
programs are old and not very much developed lately, they are still
being used! This is even more true for packages used in scientific
research: they are very often developed for a single research group
and packaged just in case someone else wants to use them, too. They do
what they were designed to do, but are no longer developed. It would
be a shame if these were dropped. Having a lot (of packages) to choose
from is a priviledge of Debian users - let us stick to that. You do
not need to install packages you do not intend to use - if you do not
know what some old package is for, why install it at all?

-- 
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		| Juha Jäykkä, juolja@utu.fi			|
		| home: http://www.utu.fi/~juolja/		|
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