On Mon, Sep 23, 2002 at 12:18:53PM +0200, Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists wrote: > We've heard these arguments a dozen times by now [1]. OK, they're hammered > in our heads now. You can stop now. You don't seem to have grokked them, though: > [1] * it's crap, junk, [more emotional expression - are these people on a > crusade or what?] anyway. No one's on a crusade, and no one's interested in getting rid of packages for kicks. > * it's a waste of ressources > * it's useless The issues only come into effect with one assumption: that no one is interested in a package. If people are using the package, then maintaining it, mirroring it, and providing infrastucture for it aren't a waste of time, and it's not useless, clearly. By contrast, if people aren't using it: > [2] * it's harder to get > * it's invisible -> less chances for pickup > * no bugs will be reported ...then these are irrelevant: no one wants to get it, there's no value in it being picked up, and no bugs are going to be reported (or, more importantly fixed). The real question comes in working out when "no one is interested in a package". We can't use popularity contest since (a) that only tells you no one's installed a package, and (b) doesn't cover anyone. We probably don't really _want_ to fix these, whether we're able to or not. The other possiblity people are considering is measuring whether anyone finds a package useful by whether anyone's willing to maintain it. This has a single obvious flaw: not everyone who's able to use Debian is able to maintain a Debian package. Personally I don't find that particularly compelling: first because it simply isn't *that* hard to take over a Debian package that you like and need, and second since it isn't that hard to find someone else to do it for you -- at worst, and if you _really_ value the package, you can bribe^H^H^H^H^Hpay someone to do it. I'm sure we've got enough developers in school who could use some extra cash for minimal effort, eg. Garbage packages that no one cares enough to maintain to minimal standards (applying patches if anyone cares enough to provide them and passing them on to upstrea, packaging new upstream releases, fixing or working around security issues) expend resources that can be better used elsewhere: in doing NMUs improve Debian as a whole (like the recent perl update), in the security team's time, in the time of users who install the package based on the description and find it's not useful, and so on. Making the distribution smaller and better maintained is a Good Thing, where it's possible. If you don't understand that, and appreciate it, whether you agree with it or not, you're really wasting everyone's time. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
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