Re: Removing orphaned packages from testing
Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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.
That's why I suggested starting a team. I don't expect a team to do worst
job than no maintainer at all, not even if they just fix bugs every four
months or so. And in case they were, we should design tools to detect those
cases. Don't you think so?
Cheers,
--
Raphael Geissert - Debian Maintainer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net
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