Re: orphaned packages
John Hasler <john@dhh.gt.org> writes:
> Nico Golde writes:
>> as i sew the list of orphaned packages becomes bigger and bigger. why
>> we dont use the possibility of deleting them after a period of time
>> automatically?
> Why delete them if they don't have bugs?
Well, one reason is that there are some packages that don't have bugs in
what they do, in that they implement what is described in their man pages,
but are basically obsolete or redundant with other, better maintained
packages.
A good example, IMO, would be weblint, which I keep stumbling across in
the orphaned packages page. There isn't a lot *wrong* with it, and there
don't appear to be any RC bugs in it. However, it only supports HTML 4,
there is no upstream at all (upstream cannot be contacted and their domain
has expired), there's no active development that I've been able to find,
and there are other programs already packaged for Debian that do roughly
the same thing but support current web standards, such as tidy. It's been
orphaned for about a year.
I think that adopting weblint would actually be a waste of someone's time,
time that really would be better used improving other equivalent packages
or maybe even adding a work-alike wrapper around another checker to aid
user migration.
Right now, it's a bit of a distraction to have it listed, since people
like me who are looking for packages to potentially adopt stumble across
it and spend time thinking about whether it might be a good candidate.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: