Re: "removed" Debian packages section&BTS tags
On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 11:40:45AM -0500, Drew Scott Daniels wrote:
> Aren't currently (caught) unmaintained packages maintained by Debian-qa? I
> haven't checked if any packages actually have them listed as the maintainer
> though.
packages@qa.debian.org, and we maintain 187 binary packages right now.
That's more than any other maintainer or group of maintainers. (It will
drop quite a bit when kde-i18n goes to a KDE person and whoever that is
gets the 30-odd binary packages it generates, but we have more source
packages than any other maintainer or group of maintainers too.)
There are also several packages that should have packages@qa listed and
don't yet. These are listed at <http://qa.debian.org/orphaned.html>.
> > I'm not certain. Currently everything is QA unless someone really drops a
> > package from Debian alltogether.
> >
> > This way QA could easily and quickly decide without causing much pain to
> > anybody whether they think it's necessary and useful to still maintain a
> > package. But I think QA's opinion'd about this is relevant.
>
> Yes, qa needs to be consulted regarding this proposal. I don't believe
> that it *should* create more work for qa, but it may.
It will obviously create more work for QA, which is why I think it's a
bad idea. We can't just distribute packages and then say "oh, but we
don't support those in any way at all"; that would be irresponsible.
Therefore, QA (or some other group made up from basically the same
people) will end up doing it. When somebody from the QA group asks for a
package to be removed, it is typically because they think it has too
many problems for even QA to maintain it any more, i.e. it should be
junked altogether.
We're here to distribute free software for the benefit of our users and
the community. As such, we should not distribute stuff we aren't
prepared to support *at all*, especially not if we're letting bugs keep
on piling up about it. It's just wrong to invite bugs to accumulate and
be ignored. The packages in the proposed removed archive would have to
have a group assigned to at least nominally respond to problems. So, in
other words, either the work assigned to the QA group goes upward
without bound (unless the world ends and people start adopting packages
more quickly than they're orphaned, of course), or we accept that from
time to time it's appropriate to remove packages completely.
To be constructive, I think a much better idea would be to put together
an interface (that could go on the debian.org web pages somewhere) that
would let you search for removed package names, give you a reason why
the package was removed, and possibly a pointer to the appropriate part
of snapshot.debian.net. Properly publicized, this would fulfil the need
to let users know what's happened to the package, without the overhead
of a separate archive section.
Remember that there are also packages whose maintainer requests their
removal, because they're either no longer necessary, illegal to
distribute, or whatever. From the user's point of view the removal is
just the same as the removal of an orphaned package with whatever
problems it might have, yet I don't think Debian is here to burn disk
space forever on packages whose maintainer has said we don't need them
any more. Much better would be something that tells users in all these
cases "we've removed this package on ... because ..., and some possible
replacements are ...".
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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