Policy regarding ancient/orphaned packages

[Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>]

Hi folks!

In discussions with other debian developers one important question was 
mentioned:

  Should we drop ancient/orphaned packages from our "distribution"
  and move them to some other directory in the archive?

The background: We claim to have more than 200 volunteers working on our
distribution. A quick search showed me that we currently have 1543 (!)
packages (hamm+non-free+contrib+non-us). 

However, there is long list of unmaintained packages:

   ancient packages (old package format):      16
   orphaned packages:                          90

I think the problem is that it is "too easy" to create a new Debian
package now. Everyone just looks for new upstream packages and creates
.debs but does not want to maintain these packages a few weeks later.

That's why I suggest the following policy:

     Packages without a maintainer ("orphaned packages") or packages which
     are very old will be moved into the "project/orphaned" directory.

Advantages I see:

  - packages are still available but you can't access them automatically
    using dselect

  - old packages which noone needs will be moved out of the
    distribution

  - packages that are important but which do not have a maintainer
    will hopefully be taken over by someone else

  - all packages in the distribution will have a real person taking care
    of them

  - porting to non-Intel platforms will hopefully get easier if all
    packages are in the new package format (I was told that this is/was
    a major problem in the porting process)

In summary: We currently have a mechanism of how to introduce new packages
but we should also have a "process" of how to get rid of (unmaintained
useless) packages.

(The `project/orphaned' directory has already been set up but it currently
only holds two packages.)

Any comments are welcome!

If the QA people agree with me I'll forward this to debian-devel.


Thanks,

Chris

--                  Christian Schwarz
                     schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Debian is looking     schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
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