Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
What is experimental about these packages? Experimental has a purpose. It is not keeping unsupported packages around.The reason why I think that moving some of the orphaned packages to experimental is a good idea, is because often, you run into packages that are still useful to a small number of users, have no alternative, still basically work, but have been orphaned for >2 years with nobody willing to maintain them. In that case, we should not release with such packages, but it should still be available (though unsupported) to the users.
The packages are still on archive.d.o if they ever made a release (and soon more finely grained on snapshots). The typical package did not get nontrivial updates in a release cycle before it was removed, so the version on archive.d.o will be just as good as the version you want to stuff into experimental.
If the users who still derive benefit from the package do not want to maintain it, tough luck. Free software works relies on people helping out. I cannot see how turning experimental "maintained packages that can use a test drive before general consumption" into "pile of broken, obsolete packages nobody ever wants to see again" is something that benefits Debian at large. In addition, I cannot see how users without means to obtain the package from archive.d.o or some snapshot repository can responsibly be pointed at experimental as a source of packages. The same people who do not help out maintaining would also be less likely to file bugs. Leaving experimental essentially as a dump where packages rot without ever seeing any attention. Eventually experimental will become as useless as sourceforge as a source of working software. Improving Debian? Only if your only measure is number of packages, probably. Other than that? No.
Please do not turn Debian into "Pile of Packages" as opposed to "operating system" more than it already is.
Kind regards T.P.S.: Of course, a lot time might be freed if Debian QA didn't effectively maintain half of the non-orphaned packages as well when it comes to fixing bugs. But as things are like they are....
-- Thomas Viehmann, http://thomas.viehmann.net/