Re: Orphaned packages with very low popcon numbers
Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
>I'm curiously amused that the "don't spend time on them!" crowd is now
>spending time on them. Why? The "just ignore them" strategy hasn't
>been a disaster so far; why not continue it?
(1) Whenever I go to install packages, I see these packages. "Oh, an addressbook
program for GTK, how interesting". Little do I know that it's dead
upstream and unmaintained. I get rather ticked off when I figure out that I've
downloaded a piece of junk, because it looks, in the descriptions, just like everything
else in Debian.
Now we can't do much about a lot of this junk, but for pity's sake, can't we at least
get rid of some of the stuff which is orphaned?
Is Debian really supposed to be a jumble sale? Joey Hess, I think, was
saying something about not wanting Debian to be a supermarket. But this is worse
than a supermarket. This is like a supermarket where mouldering products from
bankrupt companies are displayed next to, and with the same packaging as, spiffy
products from functioning companies.
(2) When I go to write patches and do QA uploads, particularly for transitions and
whatnot, I tend to pick my targets fairly randomly. I bet some other people do too.
I don't usually check first whether the package is in fact a 0-popcon-installation
package. It's chaff which QA volunteers end up putting wasted effort into because
it's not immediately *obvious* that it's chaff.
----
To allay all fears of automated removal, I was indeed planning to examine
each package individually. For no more than about 10 minutes per package,
certainly, but individually. (How else to spot that the package is in an
extremely narrow field and unlikely to ever have many users, or that it's
packaging an upstream with a really hideous upstream install system, or
that it has significant reverse dependencies, etc.)
The primary function of the list was to make a list of packages which were
worth checking to see if they should be dropped. There are *so many* orphaned
packages that I didn't want to just start going through them alphabetically,
which was my first instinct when looking for removal candidates!
--
Nathanael Nerode <neroden@fastmail.fm>
"(Instead, we front-load the flamewars and grudges in
the interest of efficiency.)" --Steve Lanagasek,
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01056.html
Reply to: