On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 02:35:05PM +0200, Ricardo Mones wrote:
> > > I hate learning that lesson.
> >
> > Likewise. Such removals make me want to quit Debian just a little bit
> > more and maintain packages just a little bit less.
>
> Yeah, I have to agree, sadly.
I love when we avoid getting emotional and retain our ability to look at
the actual (QA) problems :-) More seriously, I think there are a couple
of intertwined problems here.
- First problem: we have a problem of inertia in removing packages that,
for various reasons, should not be part of the archive (note: this has
nothing to do with aafigure and I've no idea if it fits that bill or
not; nor it matters). Unmaintained packages might create extra burden
on some teams, such as the security team, who still have to care for
them. I imagined members of such team might have grown a bit weary of
such packages and they probably take care of removing them from the
archive more than others. As it happens, who does some work might make
a mistake (again: not sure if that's the case for aafigure or not,
let's stay on the general discussion); who does not is less likely to
make mistakes...
- Second problem: AFAICT from Jakub's mail, he has been notified of the
removal only *after* it has actually happened. That has,
understandably, upset him who might have not had the time to maintain
the package, but was still interested in having it in the archive. I
guess that if he had been notified before the actual removal all this
negative emotions could have been avoided, and he could have brought
his reasons not to remove the package. Related to this: package
removal is a bit of a PITA to undo, unless I'm mistaken.
If the above is correct, it looks like we just need a couple of entirely
_technical_ improvements to avoid bad feelings like this one in the
future:
1) notify the last maintainer of a orphaned package when requesting its
removal (that could happen automatically --- if someone provides the
appropriate patch to the appropriate piece of infrastructure --- or
simply documented as a best practice in devref)
2) make it easy to undo a package removal at the dak level, so that in
the future people like Jakub can simply request to undo a removal
actions and we're all as happy as we were before this thread
There is very little we cannot undo in Debian and we tend to be plagued
by inertia. Therefore it is generally better to work on easy way to undo
mistakes and rely more on peer review, than discouraging others to do
something in the future.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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