On Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 05:00:21PM +0200, Benjamin BAYART wrote: > Le Fri, Jul 15, 2005 at 03:25:44PM +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar: > > 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. > When you say that, or you're wrong, or "nobody" is to be understood as > "nobody in the Debian developpers" in which case you're right. But the > fact that a package is of no interest to a Debian developper does not > prove the package to be useless or deprecated. > Get one step further. There are some packages that will never be > orphaned, because it would mean the end of Debian: packages like dpkg or > debhelp. Would you claim that debhelp is the most useful package in all > Debian for all users? That sounds false. It's clearly one of the most > useful packages for Debian developper, and so they all have interest in > it being maintained and improved, so it will never get orphaned, but it's > much less usefull for Debian users, which are the real target of the > distribution. > The orphaned packages are quite the opposite: they are of no interest > for the Debian developpers, so there is no maintainer any more, but they > might be of interest for users, or for developpers in other technologies > than the ones used for Debian. Of course, some of those are deprecated, > or of bad quality, but this is not always true. Packages need to have maintainers -- meaning, someone needs to take responsibility for the package. Orphaned packages *routinely* slip into stable releases with release critical bugs that have been in the package for a year or more, sometimes even introduced by a QA upload. We don't know if these packages have users, but we *do* know there's no one in a position of responsibility over the packages who's using them and is fixing bugs that appear during use! Orphaning isn't *proof* that a package is in bad shape, but it is a *very* strong indicator, to the point that from an RC-bugginess standpoint, we're better off removing long-orphaned packages rather than leaving them in the archive on the off chance that they're both used and free of RC bugs. If someone objects to the removal of a particular package, they should figure out how to get the package adopted -- by themselves, or by someone they can persuade to maintain it. > > 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. > I don't agree on that point. The natural conclusion would be that the > users of a package are natural candidates to be maintainers. Which mean > that a package *must* have developpers in its users. Which can lead to > the fact that there are mostly packages for developper-related topics. Development precedes use; it can't happen any other way. The presence of development-related packages is a *good* thing, not a bad one as you seem to suggest; it's a necessary precondition for packaging the things that non-developer users are going to want to use. Every library in the archive has (and needs to have) a -dev package. > This is probably one of the reasons why there are not enough packages in > certain areas (nothing to help establishing a good scolar edition of a > text, for an example, while there are a numerous free software to do so), > but I don't think it's a good thing. I have no idea what "establishing a good scolar edition of a text" is supposed to mean, but when there are millions of users who find that Debian meets their needs, I can't give too much credence to an argument that Debian's model is broken based on the absence of one particular class of application. And even if I did, that wouldn't have much to do with removing orphaned packages -- a package only becomes an orphan if there was once someone who cared enough to maintain it in the first place. If you think there is an application missing from Debian, perhaps you should file an RFP. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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