Re: Development standards for unstable
Jeroen van Wolffelaar <jeroen@wolffelaar.nl> writes:
> Well, that's current practice, but nobody is stopping anyone to give a
> little bit more care into QA packages...
The hardest problem, speaking as someone who wanted to do that and who
still wants to do that as soon as I can find time, is that many of the
packages that are QA-maintained are very difficult for the average
developer to test. For various reasons, QA accumulates a lot of packages
with obscure usages or obscure dependencies that are difficult to modify
just because one can't be sure one hasn't broken something.
For example:
dcl: GNU Enterprise - Double Choco Latte
eco5000: Orga Eco 5000 smartcard reader PCSC and CT-API driver
gnusim8085: Graphical Intel 8085 simulator
goldedplus: Offline mail reader for Fidonet and Usenet
gsmartcard: A smart card reading, writing and managing program for Gnome
gtkhx: A GTK+ version of Hx, a UNIX Hotline Client
just to pick a few obvious ones off the first page of the orphaned package
list that I'd have no idea how to test.
> Also, I am wondering how much success such a 'common maintained packages
> team' would have while there is a shortage of people caring for general
> QA of orphaned packages or just on the archive at all.
Yeah. It's not like there's a shortage of work now. I have 20 or 25
saved messages of people looking for sponsors, another 20 QA packages with
bugs that I think I can fix, and a bunch of work for the Debian Perl group
that I could do as soon as I find some free time.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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