[Mageia-dev] Package adoption campaign, 3 months later

Wed Dec 14 23:27:20 CET 2011

Op woensdag 14 december 2011 23:19:40 schreef Michael Scherer:
+> Le samedi 10 décembre 2011 à 12:14 +0100, Samuel Verschelde a écrit :
+> > You're explaining why having orphan packages is bad and it's hard to
+> > disagree, but I fail to see why such a mailing list for people who are
+> > ready to devote some time to orphan packages would make things worse.
+> > It's not because it's not the ideal solution that it's bad, is it?
+> 
+> Because such a mailling list would just incite people to add package and
+> never remove them, because "that's not really unmaintained, that's
+> collectively maintained". Which is just a non sense.
+
+like mysql
+
+> That's how it was in Mandriva, so the proposition is just not helping.
+> 
+> Each time a cleaning was attempted, someone said "but come on, we are
+> taking care of it collectively, so you cannot remove, it could still
+> help". And so almost nothing was removed.
+> 
+> I see no reason to think it will be different. Same situation, same
+> spirit, same users, same outcome.
+> 
+> Either people agree that we should have no orphans, and then the list is
+> useless, or they think we should keep orphans, and then this is causing
+> issues. Middle ground ( like "let's keep orphan for X months" ) are just
+> a variation of the first one, and so we would just be discussing the
+> duration.
+
+imho this mailing list is only good to notify other of maintainer who aren't 
+active with their package, and to let people see: "oops, this one is 
+unmaintained, but i need it, so i'll maintain it."
+
+so imo it should contain information: maintainership (if any), # bugs, perhaps 
+even other packages that require or buildrequire it...
+
+i think this mailing list would be good, (not only for having no maintainer)
+
+> So let's try to make a proposal, if there is a list, after how many
+> months should a package be removed from the repository if not maintained
+> ( and by maintained, I do not say "not changes or anything", I really
+> mean "no one listed as maintainer" ) ?
+
+otoh, this is difficult, eg: 
+
+mysql have no maintainer atm
+i want to provide mariadb as alternative, and be maintainer of that. (and drop 
+mysql)
+
+but a convergence time is required, imho.
+
+so, i would say, packages could be dropped if no maintainer is set for 3 
+months unless someone is doing the work to get this dropped as a result of 
+something else.
+
+agreed?
+