Re: Work-needing packages report for Sep 6, 2002
On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 06:56:09PM +0200, Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Colin Watson wrote:
> > 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.
You're basically saying that nobody should try to take responsibility
for the distribution as a whole, as far as I can tell, and that we
should all just stick to the little patches we maintain ourselves. I
think that's completely wrong. I have seen plenty of packages that
Debian would be better off without, because they make users' impression
of our clue levels worse.
Also we aren't forcing our users to do without anything. They don't have
to remove the package at the same time we do. There's archive.debian.org
full of stuff, random web sites all over the place, the morgue if a
developer wants to resurrect something, etc. And after all, what's the
difference between leaving your current working version of a package
installed and having a version in the Debian archive that's never
updated? It's equally unsupported either way.
If there's real demand, somebody will file an RFP bug, ask on a mailing
list, or whatever, and we'll know about it. It's not the end of the
world. In the meantime perhaps it will encourage people to look for
alternatives, and who knows? Maybe they'll even have an active
maintainer who cares about the package and be better as a result.
> And, btw. and IMHO: there is a lot of software that is "maintained" but
> of lesser quality than non-maintained software.
Yes, please stop beating this horse. I said that being unmaintained is a
good indicator, and I stand by that. I also don't particularly care
about the distinction between "completely orphaned" and "de facto
orphaned due to missing-in-action maintainer"; they end up being the
same thing in the long run anyway.
> > 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.
I don't think the Debian archive has to be the be-all and end-all of all
the available free software in the world. We're here to provide *good*
free software. The fact that there are maintained packages which are
also buggy needs to be fixed too, but is a (somewhat) orthogonal
problem.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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