Taking care of exising packages
Dear all,
Motivated by some unfortunate trends seen in debian-mentors, I would
like to raise (again) the question of wheter we are doing the right
thing or not.
Here is my plea:
,----
| Attn Debian/Ubuntu/whatever developers and maintainers:
|
| It is with sadness that I see many NEW packages uploaded to the Debian
| repository and little thought about some packages that are already in
| the distribution, but that are bit-rotting.
|
| Please, if an existing package has not been updated for some time, just
| publicize this fact more conspicuously. Let us engage the existing (and
| prospective) maintainers in taking care of aging, but still useful
| packages.
|
| If, OTOH, the packages are not useful, or no one is willing to maintain
| it in Debian, I would propose to remove it as soon as possible from the
| archives, since they present problems (two of the first that come to
| mind are: users installing packages that won't work/might break their
| systems, and the burden of having to worry about security updates).
|
| In a certain sense, more *MAINTAINANCE* of programs should be expected
| from Debian Developers/Maintainers (and not only of packages, but also
| regarding the ports).
|
| Let us take a moment of reflextion regarding the archive as a whole and
| not just fire up/accept new ITP's and RFS's without taking into
| consideration the current state (and the Release Critical bug counts) of
| the existent packages.
|
| This is not meant to say that new packages should be unnacepted: just
| that a second (and third, fourth, etc) thought should be given if you
| can help improve the Distribution, so that we don't end up with a lot of
| half-working packages where all but a few are actually usable.
`----
Regards, Rogério Brito.
P.S.: Please, CC'me as I am only subscribed to -mentors, but not -devel.
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8
http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito : http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org
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