Re: How to motivate contributors to work on QA

[Ansgar <ansgar@debian.org>]

Hi,

Christian Kastner writes:
> Example #1: Orphaned/RFA'd packages
> ~~~~~~~~~~~
> Orphaned packages are packages that, by definition, no one is interested
> in maintaining. There are no volunteers willing to commit to them.
>
> However, some of these packages are important to the Debian ecosystem.
> For example, schroot is a key package for our infrastructure and for
> many contributors, yet it's been orphaned since 2018. Other orphaned
> packages are less visible directly, but may have dozens of affected
> reverse dependencies.

I'm not a DPL candidate, but I don't think the solution is to pay people
to work on such packages.  Instead we should migrate away from them
where possible.

For example instead of schroot, we should move to some alternative
container solution such as Docker, podman, systemd-nspawn, ...  In some
cases maybe even throw-away VMs instead of throw-away containers
(e.g. for buildds).  Another example is anacron (migrate to systemd
timer units?).

Of course this isn't always possible; for example I don't think we can
easily remove/replace autoconf (as another QA Group-maintained package
installed on my laptop).

Ansgar