Bug#625502: Inquiry re: adopting qt3
On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 11:51:10PM -0400, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> I'd like to ask to adopt Qt 3, entirely for the sake of the LSB. The
> LSB is working on removing Qt 3, but that effort won't be ready in time
> for wheezy, and I'd like for full LSB support to remain possible in Debian.
>
> What are your thoughts? I don't think this would take away from the
> release goal of ridding Qt 3 dependencies from Debian; it would be good,
> I think, to release with only LSB depending on Qt 3. I understand it's
> a C++ package of some complexity, and that I'd be responsible for
> analyzing security fixes, bugs, etc. on my own without upstream support
> from TrollTech.
Hi Jeff,
This might have been a good idea 1 year ago or even 6 months ago.
Then we would have had time to get a team of interested people working
on Qt3 with time to get into its inner workings.
The fact is that Qt3 rotted in the Debian archive for one year
with just QA uploads when it got in somebody's way (e.g porters
uploads of Aurelien Jarno). This was a strong sign that it
was better to remove the package. I started to work on the removal
and things have been going smoothly, with about 80% of the work done.
This has taken a significant amount of my time and others (developers,
ftp-masters, etc). At this point, nominal LSB compliance is not a good
reason to keep Qt3. Interested parties can always download it from
snapshot.debian.org
Today we are 2-3 weeks away from the wheezy freeze, and there's no time to
get a team of people working on Qt3 with enough knowledge of the internals
who can commit to this task for the next 3 years (or more).
More importantly, maintaining any package that you won't be using
is _never_ a good idea and in this case, you would even have to be
upstream for it!
I suggest we work on documenting how to get Qt3 from snapshots.debian.org
If somebody wants to install Qt3 will have easy instructions to get it and
they will be fully aware it is not supported anymore.
Ana
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