Re: Idea for maintaining packages up for adoption
On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 02:48:39PM +0200, Benjamin BAYART wrote:
>
> Mike Stone:
> >
> > If you're pretty much automatically accepting any kind of contribution
> > it's not a debian package any more. Just set up your own package archive
> > somewhere for packages like this and encourage people to use it.
> > notquitedebian.org is available...
>
> My guess is that it sounds like what is happening during bug squashing
> parties, except that the work is made more easy: if the proposed patches
> are in a VCS, the only work remaining is that to check quickly that
> everything sounds good, the conflicts between the patches have already
> been dealt with by the submiter.
I personally don't really see much advantage of a VCS for orphaned
packages -- the orphaned state really ought to be temporarily, and it's
very rare that two people happen to work simultainuously on one and the
same package. If a non-DD contributer finishes making a revision,
someone can sponsor this non-DD.
What would be useful is having some queue/list with new packages
waiting to be sponsored. Using a VCS as proposed here seems to be a bit
overkill, some other interface might be more appropriate. A wiki page?
As far as I can see though, there are not really technical problems
with the low maintainance of orphaned packages, but more the reason
that they are still orphaned -- nobody has a really big interest in
them.
Also, bear in mind that if nobody really is interested in a given
package, it is sometimes better to just move onwards to get the package
removed, instead of having it fixed by someone just for the sake of it
(and not because one uses the package). Natural selection on Debian
packages (and in general on open source projects) is a good thing to
have, and just fixing orphaned packages reduces the natural selection
efficiency.
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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