Re: Work-needing packages report for Sep 6, 2002

[tomas p <tpo2@sourcepole.ch>]

On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Junichi Uekawa wrote:

> On Tue, 10 Sep 2002 10:15:06 +1000 (EST)
> Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > > Because leaving them unmaintained forces the work to be done by other
> > > groups within debian (e.g., qa or security.) If it bothers you so much
> >
> > What work?  If they're working, leave them be.  If they're broken, then if
> > nobody wants to fix them they won't get released.
>
> There are many packages which are unmaintained, and
> some people are working hard on fixing bugs on them.

They get an NMU and they're back in order. No need to remove them.

> Debian is a moving target. Packages stop building from
> source, dependency chains break, etc. from time to time.

Then they'll get an RC and they're out of the next stable release. No
problem so far.

> I think it is a good idea to remove packages without
> any responsible soul behind it.

I still do not understand what exactly the problem of an unmaintained
package is. That it's unmaintained? So what?

We do have a mechanism to remove crap software allready. Unmaintained
packages do not hurt anybody.

Somebody suggested that removed packages are archived somewhere anyway.
The nice thing about Debian is though that you can do apt-get or some
equivalent of it and install a package, check if it fits and remove it.
You don't have to go searching some obscure archive for "maybe it will
install stuff".

And unmaintained software in the pool has the advantage that if somebody
is interested enough then we'll at least get NMUs because the package is
_visible_ (!). And maybe the package will get picked up again. If the
package is invisible (shoved inside some shelve) then the effort to make
an NMU will be bigger. We don't want that.

I've been personally NMUing two packages gnobog and afbackup that I was
using, that were not maintained, but for which I did not have enough time
to properly maintain them and they _did_ get finally picked up and
maintained after a year or so.

*t

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