Re: Future releases of Debian
On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 12:56:45PM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> Moin Adrian!
> Adrian Bunk schrieb am Saturday, den 19. July 2003:
>
> > Where's the big use if you ship 7 CDs but some random packages are not
> > present?
> >
> > You might not care, but perhaps thousands of users care.
> >
> > The "What, Debian 3.1 ships 10 CDs but this common program I need for my
> > work that was in Debian 3.0 is not included?" would do much harm to the
> > reputation of Debian.
>
> Bitching about this problem won't help. Instead, I suggest automated
> MIA probes (warning email) with maintainers who have RC bugs open
> without any comment or without a comment but not particular action in 14
> days, for example (hello tbm ;-). Looking at the RC bug list, I get the
> impression that many maintainers are just not interessted in maintaining
> their packages. The mail should contain the suggestion to orphan the
> package or set the help flag or file an RFA bug report on it. When the
> maintainer does not respond in 4 weeks, orphan the package. No bug gets
> fixed by just waiting (in normal situations) and when the package gets
> removed from the stable distribution, well, blame the maintainer instead
> of posting rhetorical questions on -devel.
I strongly agree with you there. I'm very pleased to see that something is
currently happening, with a whole wave of orphaning packages from MIA
maintainers.
>From the last mail about RC bugs on -devel-announce and the WNPP bugs, I can
see that there is 23 RC bugs about orphaned packages [1], not counting the 5
ones flaged pending or patched[2]. Some of the offending package may be
removed...
156057, for example, looks insane to me. We live with a package in main
providing unfree stuff since almost one year, and a recent bug report states
that it does not even work well for the users. Shouldn't it be kilkilkiled ?
But still, there is 838 other RC bugs (157 flaged pending or patched, and
681 still to do). I guess some of those packages are not maintained anymore,
and should be orphaned for a while, and removed from the archive if nothing
happens in the next few months for them.
I guess that the Debian reputation is much more hurted by not being able to
release more than one time every two years than it would of not being able
to provide *and maintain* every piece of crappy code on the net.
That's the good old saying "If you want it in Debian, fix it".
Bye, Mt.
[1]: 156057, 181555, 183851, 183979, 186371, 186988, 187646, 190803, 191165,
191313, 192290, 192490, 193741, 195428, 195438, 196789, 197115, 198462,
198708, 199610, 199746, 201218, 201513
[2]: 193159, 195059, 195577, 196320, 201057
--
Les rebelles disaient que les débutants avaient le droit d'utiliser un
"éditeur", qui ressemblait à MSWord comme sa mère à Pamela Anderson.
"Vihaille" comme les rebelles l'appellaient, était sans doute un bizutage
-- L'histoire des pingouins
Reply to: