closing out old bugs of unmaintained releases

[Christian Iseli]

On Tue, 08 Jan 2008 21:53:23 +0000, David Woodhouse wrote:
> I welcome the non-programmers who volunteer to package software, and
> their work is very valuable -- but it really isn't going to turn out
> well for Fedora if we prioritise quantity over quality to the extent
> that we end up shipping packages which we can't _properly_ maintain.
> 
> The quote I posted earlier in this thread ("this is a bug in the
> software, not the packaging") is taken verbatim from bugzilla, and I
> find it extremely shocking. We have to do better than this, really.
> Either that or go back to having a clear 'second class' repository
> again, which I don't think we really want.

Agreed.

> Perhaps one option would be for non-programmer packagers to team up
> with a programmer/sponsor to take on the task of package maintenance?
> Where currently a package has one 'owner', there would instead be two
> rôles -- a 'packager' and potentially a separate 'hacker'. Those
> wanting to package software which they can't fully maintain for
> themselves would have to recruit a programmer-type to sign up for the
> job with them.

I like this idea.  And I know we have very capable programmers who
already offered to help squash bugs in various source code dialects.

					Christian