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Re: Handling of poorly maintained and useless packages



Kevin Mark wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 12, 2007 at 09:13:11AM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> This mail tries to address the problem of not orphaned, poorly maintained
>> or useless packages in Debian. The proposal below tries to address both
>> cases, because they are often related. (useless packages tend to be
>> poorly maintained, and vice-versa).
>> 
>> [I originally planned to discuss this during the QA meeting. But it might
>> be a better idea to first start the discussion on the mailing list, so we
>> get a rough idea of the things that have to be discussed in the meeting.
>> Also, this was originally posted to -qa@. Since it didn't degenerate into
>> a flamewar, I'm posting this to -devel@ after doing some minor changes to
>> get opinions from a larger audience.]
>> 
> 
> It seems like a great idea to remove some pacakges that are not getting
> the attention from the developers and are not the best they can be for
> the users. I have a point to add:
> 
> If I am a user of one of these packages who may have the skill to adopt
> it or may know someone who can, I may want to know about its orphaning.
> At current, this is going to be noted on -devel.
> 
> I would like a message on the user lists on _all_ orphaned packages,
> maybe just a CC of the current WNPP report?

I think many people wouldn't be happy to receive all those emails.
What about just running wnpp-alert once a week? you can even setup a weekly
cronjob and receive the reports in your email account ;-)

> 
> While I guess interested folks may be expected to look into maintaining
> a package they use, it may not happen because they assume 'someone out
> there' is doing it. But an ocassional email to the 'users of debian'
> telling that something is going to be orphaned, might wake up those "out
> of the loop." Any chance to get folks interested in Debian seem like a
> great thing, even if its only an odd email on user list. What's a few
> bytes between friends ;-)
> 




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