leaving fedora

[Hans de Goede]

Patrice Dumas wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am leaving fedora (though not EPEL)

Thanks for all the good work you've done the past years, it was always a 
pleasure to work with you, so thank you and good bye.

Below I'll respond to one point of your farewell mail, this is in no way meant 
to convince you to come back, the purpose of my remarks is to discuss 
possibilities for those who remain behind to hopefully do better at your use 
cases :)

> My use case is old non desktop stuff, fluxbox, xdm, vim, xterms,
> mutt, irssi, firefox, latex/texinfo, xfig, xpdf, numerical models,
> openoffice (because I have to). Fedora is unsuitable for me as a user
> since quite a long time, too much regressions, lack of interest for
> integrating what I use (xdm, no vfs daemon...)

As someone who is now a day maintaining xfig and ImageMagick (not listed but 
sort of fits in the list), let me chime in here. I think the biggest issue with 
quite a lot of these, is that they are maintained by @redhat.com people (yes 
I'm @redhat.com now too). The problem is that most of these packages as part of 
former Fedora Core, got these maintainers because someone had to do it, not 
because they care a whole lot about the package. Those maintainers have more 
packages to maintain / other work to do and given that these packages do not 
have a lot of users, any issues with them will get low priority if any at all.

So what can we do to make this better? Simple become a co-maintainer and fix 
any issues yourself. That is how I did things with xfig and ImageMagick when I 
got fed up with ping-ing in bugzilla (officially I'm still a co-maintainer of 
both, but in practice I seem to be the maintainer).

So I hereby call on everyone who care about these older tools: if it itches 
scratch. I know that many of you have probably submitted bugs with patches. 
That is not going to work when a package maintainer is overworked. The solution 
in my experience is to become a co-maintainer and do any fixes yourself.

###

Talking about Patrice leaving and packages of older software, this leaves 
(amongst others) lesstif orphaned. As I've co-maintained it for a while and I 
believe that offering the possibility to run old (FREE) motif apps is 
important, I will pick it up (call me crazy). But I could really use some help 
here, upstream lesstif is dead and it could really use some loving. So any 
volunteers?

Regards,

Hans