Re: Work-needing packages report for Sep 6, 2002
On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 04:55:38PM +0200, Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists wrote:
> > On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > I think we're trying to build a quality distribution, not just a pile of
> > > stuff. I'd rather see a package be removed than stop maintaining it even
> > > in QA.
> >
> > So you'd remove the package, even if people are using it and are that far
> > happy with it?
>
> Yep. We have 10000 other packages that (we hope) people are using, and
> we shouldn't waste time on things nobody wants to take responsibility
> for.
On the other side nobody is forcing anybody to care. That's up to the
individual. I do respect the work QA is doing but it's a free choice to
pick up that responsibility.
If one doesn't want to care about packages, then s/he just shouldn't.
Forcing people to do without a package because one took the burden to
care about it freely but is not willing to carry that burden is not
correct. It's a problem that respective person has to solve for
him/herself, not for the other people.
I still think beeing able to estimate the quality of a packae before
installing it is the way to go. Right now one can do that - go into the
bts and look at the list of bugs. It'd be nice of course if this would be
promptly available in the installation interface as a hint (f.ex. as a
colour or a bar or sth.).
And, btw. and IMHO: there is a lot of software that is "maintained" but
of lesser quality than non-maintained software.
> I think that it is not anywhere near as important to be able to say
> "anything you want you can apt-get install" as to be able to say
> "anything you want you can apt-get install and it'll be good".
The important thing here being that you __know__ what you get. If you know
that you're installing software that is buggy, than that's your choice.
And again: unmaintained != buggy.
> Hardly
> anybody deals with orphaned packages - I do it from time to time, Matej
> Vela is the current hero in this regard, and there are a few others -
> and I happen to believe that being long-term unmaintained is a pretty
> good indicator for lower quality.
>
> Of course there are exceptions on both sides. That's why removals should
> be requested and processed by humans, and why they're requested by
> filing bugs so that there's room for people to object.
I completely agree with this paragraph.
*t
--
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Tomas Pospisek
SourcePole - Linux & Open Source Solutions
http://sourcepole.ch
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Tel: +41 (81) 330 77 11
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