Re: criteria for acceptable languages for central QA tools in Debian (was: Re: coordination between lintian/piuparts/adequate)
On Wed Dec 11, 2024 at 10:57 PM GMT, Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas wrote:
I'd like to discuss this with a focus on general principles, and only
discuss specifics (adequate, golang) to the extent that it helps
reason about general principles.
That's going to be pretty hard, because the scenario you present is
still pretty specific.
so we have a qa testing package that was written 11y ago in perl, and
has been orphaned for almost all of that time (10y!). it's not
critical but it does serve a purpose, and it's therefore nonideal that
it's been orphaned for so long.
Certainly non-ideal. "Orphaned" does not give the full picture about the
state of the package, however: It could describe a package with critical
bugs that aren't getting fixed, or nobody doing any QA or NMU uploads of
it ever. Neither looks true for adequate.
someone takes it over and rewrites it in a language that runs in all
supported arches, and likely in many ports too as long as they keep up
with a relatively recent version of the language (in this case, a
version released 1.5y ago).
"likely in many ports too" is dancing around the fact that it *doesn't*
run on at least one port, hence Holger's complaint.
An orphaned/unmaintained-but-functional package was still serving some
purpose and was available, and by uploading a rewrite in Go, it became
unavailable. That is a shame (how significant this is, is up for debate)
If you'd chosen to upload "adequate-ng" instead, this wouldn't have
happened, although, there would be plenty of drawbacks to that too.
We're discussing the drawbacks of what you did, but I must acknowledge
the benefits too: you've adopted a package, following the correct
procedures, and (in many other respects) improved it. Thanks!
You also made an effort to reach out to users and stakeholders before
you took the action, which was a good idea.
on a meta level: I find it incredible that this conversation needs to
be had at all, given the increasing median age of Debian contributors,
and the limited popularity of perl among younger people
The "Perl Problem" is a wider issue we should explore in much more
depth. I'm personally a little surprised if it's true that younger
people are unprepared to take a stab at hacking Perl. But since that's
the case, we have deeply embedded, critical stuff written in Perl
everywhere. "adequate" is but the tip of the iceberg.
--
Please do not CC me for listmail.
👱🏻 Jonathan Dowland
✎ jmtd@debian.org
🔗 https://jmtd.net
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