Re: Debconf QA BOF summary / handling of orphaned packages
(Replying to the various comments in a single mail)
On 29/07/09 at 12:15 +0100, Marco Rodrigues wrote:
> > - move packages to experimental
>
> I vote for this option. If a package doesn't have an active
> maintainer, it should belong to experimental suite and add some note
> at PTS explaning what to do in this case.
Something that was not very clear in my mail is that the plan is to have
all the options. For each orphaned package, we can either decide:
- to remove it from debian
- to move it to experimental, if it's still marginally useful
- to keep it in unstable/testing
> Another thing, is provide by default in apt package the experimental
> suite, without the need of manual user configuration, so he can do $
> apt-get -t experimental install package easily.
experimental isn't that hard to add to one's sources.list. We will just
need to check that it's properly documented.
On 29/07/09 at 14:51 +0200, Sandro Tosi wrote:
> What about only remove them from testing?
I'm generally against the idea of having packages in unstable that are
not meant to be included in stable releases. This adds a lot of noise to
various QA reports, and also requires a way to keep them out of testing
(release team hint that would have to be updated when a QA upload is
made, or RC bug).
> about that, I though to re-implement this [1] experiment as a UDD CGI.
>
> [1] http://people.debian.org/~morph/qa_packages_analyze.html
>
> This allows to split the orphaned lists in subset allowing to select
> packages you (or your team) care them most (for example, take all the
> perl libs).
Nice! We should look into integrating this into bapase[2] somehow.
[2] http://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/bapase.cgi
On 29/07/09 at 18:34 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 12:53:54PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > - add a note on the PTS explaining how to install packages from
> > snapshots.d.o
> <snip>
> > - add a note on the PTS for experimental-only packages to explain
> > how to
> > install them.
>
> Just a comment: the PTS is not meant to be user-oriented (heck I
> cannot even contain package descriptions at the moment, since we don't
> have source package description!). I'm of course fine to add info
> about that in those pages, but they will be more like "this package is
> only available from BLA" than "add this stanza to sources.list to get
> it".
>
> The latter kind of user information should better be pushed to some
> package manager.
Sure, we should just try to find a way to provide the needed information
without cluttering the PTS with user-oriented info. For example, we
could add a link to a wiki page that would explain the procedure.
On 29/07/09 at 15:41 +0200, Bas Zoetekouw wrote:
> Correction; the was (apparently) no opposition to this
> _from_the_people_present_. I have in the past strongly opposed this,
> and I still do. IMO, there is no compelling reason to remove packages
> that work fine, have no (RC) bugs, and is actually being used (as
> shown by popcon.
>
> So, please do not remove packages simply because they are orphaned.
You are very welcomed to adopt and maintain all the packages that are
currently orphaned. However, as you might discover if you investigate
the list of orphaned packages, many of them don't match one of your 3
criterias. The goal is not to "just remove all orphaned packages from
Debian". Our first priority continues to be our users, and packages that
are reasonably useful at least a bit maintained upstream won't be
removed (but maybe moved to experimental).
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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