Re: Work-needing packages report for Mar 27, 2015

[Jeroen Dekkers <jeroen@dekkers.ch>]

At Tue, 31 Mar 2015 10:30:31 +0200,
Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> 
> Hi -devel,
> 
> > For the following packages help is requested:
> > [... massive package list ...]
> 
> is the list of packages that usually follows this line still useful for
> anybody? I mean, there are packages in it like e.g. grub2 for which help
> was "requested 3972 days ago"; that's more than a decade, folks! And
> still, the grub2 package is updated regularly and seems to be in a
> rather healthy and well-maintained state from my personal perception.

There are some people doing their best to keep it working (kudos to
them!), but grub2 still needs a lot more help. It currently has two
open rc bugs blocking the Jessie release (and if you sort by bug
number/age you see that it has the oldest and fourth oldest rc bug
that's open in jessie+sid and doesn't have a patch). The total number
of open bugs is 416 of which 113 are important.

> I think the signal-to-noise ration is rather low in this list. Maybe a
> rule should be added that packages are dropped after, say, one year
> after having requested help. If a package is still in a bad situation
> after this period of time, it may reapply for the list or should maybe
> get removed from testing. What do you say?

Dropping packages that need help from the help-wanted list doesn't
solve any problem, it only hides problems and makes it even less
likely that packages that need help get help. And removing from
testing isn't an option for packages for which no alternative exists
such as grub.


Regards,

Jeroen Dekkers