Re: Removing orphaned packages from testing

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net> writes:

> Now, back to the topic. We have a problem, which is:
>    We have too many orphaned packages.
> Those orphaned packages are orphaned either:
>    (A) because they are 'crap' (poor quality/useless software, or
>        software for which better alternatives exist)
>    (B) because nobody knows they are orphaned
>    (C) because nobody is interested in maintaining them

I think there's another case here, namely:

 (D) the software is useful, perhaps only in some corner cases but still
     useful, but all the people who both use it and have enough Debian
     experience to maintain it don't have enough time to do a proper job

I suspect that there's a lot of orphaned software in that category.  For
example, running wnpp-alert at the moment on my system, I see RFAs for
libytnef, magicfilter, and ytnef and an O for xalan, none of which is
crap, exactly, all of which I use, and all of which I have some interest
in maintaining, but I don't have enough time to do justice to any of them.

I guess this is sort of like (C), but it feels a bit different to me.
I'll end up adopting xalan if I have to to keep it in the archive, since
it's a dependency for some Shibboleth packages, but I really only care
about it insofar as Shibboleth might want to use it, so I'm not a good
choice to maintain it if someone else really uses it.

> 2) improve awareness of orphaned packages. During the QA BOF, the idea of
>    a script taking as input a list of packages (the list of locally
> installed packages on a DD's system, for example), and outputting the
> list of "problems" (RC bugs, O/RFA bugs) was raised. There was
> opposition to providing this as something enabled by default in
> devscripts, but it would still make sense to provide such a script.

wnpp-alert and rc-alert already do this, don't they?

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>