Re: dealing with dead projects
On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, Sam Powers wrote:
>
> > I've got a package, xmms-liveice, which is very, very unstable. The
> > upstream author has moved on to other projects, and doesn't seem
> > particularly interested in making the code work better.
>
> Beat him over the head with some of ESR's writings, specifically the part
> which states that the final responsibility of a free software author is to
> find an appropriate successor when your own interest has died. <grin>
For any except the most interesting high profile projects, this tends to
be unrealistic. Even if you find someone who agrees to do it, they
probably won't do anything worthwhile.
> > It's an xmms plugin, written in C. I don't know C, so I can't fix the bugs
> > myself. How should I go about finding an interested party to get this code
> > stabalized?
>
> Not a lot of hope. Unless there's a C programmer out there who is
> sufficiently annoyed by the deficiencies to do the work, you've got two
> basic choices:
>
> 1) Learn C and do it yourself, or
>
> 2) Pay someone to do it for you.
3) Mark the whole thing as deprecated somehow so users know where they
stand at least.
Since debian implicitly endorses the software we package (if a debian
developer liked it enough to package it, it must be worth looking at), we
need a general way to do 3). It violates our shall-not-hide-problems
mandate not to do this.
Free software packages come and go, we can't afford to eternally clutter
debian with every now-dead package that got added 5 years ago.
Britton
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