Russ, On Mon, Aug 02, 2004 at 03:49:36PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > 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. Would you mind following up to the wnpp bug with this information, and cc: debian-qa on the message, so that someone can start the process of getting it removed from the archive? FWIW, I don't think that removing orphaned packages from the archive is something that should be done automatically; but I do think we have a responsibility to phase out packages when we no longer believe it's in our users' best interest to install them -- to the point that I think more maintainers should be asking for removal of their own packages instead of orphaning. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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