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Re: Orphaned packages that were not part of etch



On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 05:50:10PM -0500, Raphael Geissert wrote:
> Holger Levsen wrote:
> > Yes. It's orphaned. If you really care about the package, please adopt it.
> > Thanks.
> 
> I do care about the package but as a spare user, not as a maintainer; I
> won't put my name on a package I really won't be maintaining the way it
> deserves to be maintained.

So you think the Debian QA group, consisting of at most a dozen people
who do QA uploads, maintaining over 500 packages, will take better care
of it? 

> >> IMHO there are many other packages that are better candidates for not
> >> being shipped in lenny than the above mentioned example.
> > 
> > Debian is a distribution which is organised in a way that there are
> > packages and package maintainers. *Pause*
> > Sometimes the latter give up, so these packages are orphaned, Orphaned
> > packages which are not picked up by new maintainers IMHO shouldn't be part
> > of a Debian release.
> 
> Oh really? so we should just say "sorry, no more foo for you" to the almost
> 22k users who have imlib on their system? also to the 31635 users of
> mdbtools, the 3k users of metamail, 34660 of vbetool, 7620 of htdig (which
> is a strong dependency of khelpcenter), and so son.

Yes, if not _one_ of the over 1000 people that maintain Debian packages
steps forward and takes responsibility. No one hinders them from
searching co maintainers or a group to spread the load. There are
several very successful maintainer groups nowadays.

I just think that the QA group should not aspire to become the general
collaborative maintainance group of Debian. I think the QA group should
concentrate on maintaining orphaned packages until they get a new
maintainer, not _as the new maintainer_.

(And the "installed" numbers in popcon aren't exactly the ones I
would concentrate on. But that is only a side point.)

> I've nothing against cleaning up the archive; but IMHO packages with no
> severe bugs, with active upstreams, and with a good number of users
> shouldn't be the target of a 'hard' (i.e. preventing it from being shipped
> in stable) cleanup.

I really think including them in a stable release and then remove them
is the worse solution.

Gruesse,
-- 
Frank Lichtenheld <djpig@debian.org>
www: http://www.djpig.de/


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