Re: Bug#1122194: ITS: mp3splt
Hi,
On 2025-12-10 23:36, Andreas Tille wrote:
Am Wed, Dec 10, 2025 at 12:11:49PM +0100 schrieb Sebastian Ramacher:
> So I guess your advise changed from "orphan" to "remove" in this
> specific case of mp3splt, right?
Sounds like the best option currently.
Sorry I didn't jump into this dialogue earlier, it's been a pretty busy
week.
As the current "most recent adopter" of this package, I'll throw in my
2c
but then leave it to others to judge its fate.
mp3splt is one of those tools that has a fairly narrowly defined job,
that
you don't generally need to do every day, but when you do need to do it,
there really isn't any other tool made to do that job (or at least
wasn't
at the time I needed and revived it, and I'm not off the cuff aware of
any
change to that since).
Since then, we've all got older and busier, and the mp3 container format
is no longer as commonly used as it was, though there are still plenty
of
them in existence and I don't expect that to change any time soon.
So this package hasn't got the sort of attention that it might if it was
something that had everyday use, or if I was the sort of person with so
much spare time on my hands that I was itching for busywork to do which
would have near to no real world consequence - and I'm very grateful to
the people who have stepped up from time to time to upload some
improvement
to it that scratches some itch of their own.
In between those times, it's mostly sat in a state of suspended
animation
ready for the next person who needs it to give it enough love, should it
at that time need it, to do the job they need it to do. It's not tangled
up in the dependency chain of other applications and affecting their own
usability or suitability, it's just quietly hanging out in its own
little
chrysalis waiting for its next rebirth, but not hiding out of sight or
erased from existence for the next person to have the need that it
meets.
And I know we have the deletionists who think that kind of existence is
intolerable - but I know for sure that if I turn out to be the next
person
who needs this, I'd be very glad to find the seed of what I need already
available, even if it needs a little sun and water to make it germinate
again.
So if someone else wants to officially make themselves an uploader of
this
then good contributions to it will be very welcome. If they don't, and
it
still exists in the repo the next time that I am that person, and I'm
still
one if its listed uploaders, then I'll share my work with everyone else
by uploading it. But if its not, then it's probably very likely that I
wouldn't bother to push it through NEW again, and it will just join the
ranks of the other packages in my own private repo that I now, for
whatever reason, only maintain for myself and other users on my internal
network.
I agree that, ideally, one would have as complete a picture of the
package's state as possible before starting an ITS. In practice,
however, this is not always realistic.
I'm a bit confused by that. Why would you start an ITS if you actually
had no idea of what adopting it would involve, of its current back
story,
and/or had no intention to actually 'salvage' it?
Surely knowledge must precede any declaration of intent?
Action without awareness is the character of a berserker, and taking
possession of something you have no intention to restore to use isn't
'salvaging' - it's ... I don't know, more like hijacking a vessel with
no idea of what value its content might have to you?
I know that's a word with specific meaning in this context, but
dressing something up in A Process doesn't change the character of
that thing - and an actual 'hijack' here is again usually something
that someone with a genuine knowledge of and interest in improving
the package does as a violent expression of frustration.
Without me taking any action, the security-relevant issues would
likely have remained unnoticed, and the package would simply have
continued to bit-rot quietly.
Sorry, but that's not really true. The issues were not 'unnoticed'
and not being actively developed is not 'bit rotting'.
There are a near infinite number of problems in the world that many
people are very very aware of, but that are not so pressing that
they demand immediate action to fix at the cost of spending time on
other more genuinely urgent things. This is just one of them.
So in the absence of someone else stepping up to the be the primary
point of contact for issues regarding this package, I'm happy to
continue on in that role. And this package does still have a
relevant (if somewhat niche) job that it performs which we have no
other equivalent replacement for that I'm aware of.
The strange irony is that it probably would have taken only a tiny
proportion of the energy that seems to have gone into this
discussion to make it ship shape and shiny and new again and take
it off the radar of the deletionists.
If I knew I would never have any interest in this ever again, I
would have orphaned it. That's very different from it just being
a long time since I have last needed it, and nobody else needing
it often enough to want to put their hand up to add themselves to
the pointy end of that role.
I don't think it's right to try and foist it onto another team
that did not volunteer themselves willingly - but I don't think
the absence of such a team is a good reason to simply annihilate
it either.
But if people really want to do that, I'm not going to waste more
energy that I could have spent on something more valuable fighting
them, I'll just (be forced to) stop sharing any energy I do later
spend on it if they put up barriers to that.
We seem to have a few people making it their work to remove any
rarely used package that *they* don't personally have any interest
in - I'm not saying that's how this started, but it seems to have
pretty quickly moved in that direction whatever the initial intent.
So I'm going to leave it to the people who gave this momentum to
decide what that energy will ultimately achieve. But my own
personal intermittent need for this won't be changed by that,
so it's really just a question of whether Debian users as a whole
will have any future work done by anyone able and interested
in improving this made available to them too.
If I missed something important elsewhere in this thread that
still needs addressing then do feel free to point, but I think
that pretty much covers it.
All The Loves,
Ron
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