Re: Uploaders orphaning packages / Conda (Was: Bug#921382: kineticstools: autopkgtest needs update for new version of h5py)
Hello,
على ٣٠/٥/١٤٤٠ هـ ٢:١٦ ص، كتب Andreas Tille:
> Hi Afif,
>
> please lets move this to the list I guess it is fine to quote your
> non-privat text here.
Fine with me.
>
> On Tue, Feb 05, 2019 at 01:03:26AM -0500, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
>>
>> The
>> problem is I'm not sure how filing an RFA or orphaning a package works
>> within a team. I think what I should have done in the beginning is send
>> out a message on the debian-med list asking for someone to take over and
>> then formally orphan/remove the ones that didn't get adopted.
>
> You could start with removing yourself as Uploader which is a clear sign
> that you will not work on this any more.
Can do.
> I might consider adding myself
> to make sure we have at least one uploader in the team. I do not see
> any reason to remove packages that are functional and not RC buggy (over
> several releases).
>
Ok
>>> I remember you
>>> said you are not using these any more but the same is true for me - I
>>> never ever used any of those packages and I spent a lot of time on these
>>> anyway> I wonder whether you might be able to become active and deal
>>> with the issues on the packages where you are in the Uploaders field.
>>
>> I don't think you should spend time on the packages you have no interest
>> in, either.
>
> What means "interest"? If it is I should not spend time on packages I'm
> not using for my own work I can leave Debian Med since I'm not using a
> single one. As a Debian maintainer I want to provide a useful system
> for my colleagues and the motivation to maintain also packages that are
> not used here is to possibly attract even more people to join the
> effort. This attraction of people has worked to some extend (way better
> than in other teams but admittedly I was hoping for more active
> contributors).
Ok, that's another form of interest. My original interest was personal,
with the willingness to share work I was going to be doing for myself
anyway. Yours is a little bit different.
>
>> What I would be willing to do is file for removal of the
>> packages where I'm listed as the sole uploader.
>
> I do not think that we should remove packages with some popcon users
> that are not RC buggy.
>
Ok
>> Even if I was still using the packages, it is much less motivating to
>> maintainer Debian packages for scientific software than something
>> vendor-neutral and user-installable like conda, which has become very
>> popular in bioinformatics. In fact, all these PacBio packages that I had
>> created for Debian are now packaged in conda by upstream itself.
>
> Honestly, I think the conda-hype has some positive effects also for our
> packaging. I realised that upstreams learned that release tags are a
> good idea, responding to issues of packagers is more frequent and so on.
> IMHO software that is fit for Conda packaging has increased chances to
> be not hard to package for Debian as well.
Sure.
> I do not see Conda as a pure
> competitor to our efforts since there are also different areas where the
> different packaging efforts are differently suited.
I think it is a pure competitor for the bioinformatics packages; at
least the ones I worked on.
> However, by all
> means we should force the effort to package the Conda tools themselves
> in any case.
>
I gave conda as an example. It has problems of its own, like unbearable
sluggishness [1,2], but the general idea of cross-platform, unprivileged
package management is what appeals to scientists.
regards
Afif
1. https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/7700
2. https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/7938
--
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name
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