Proposed removal of packages with long-standing FTBFS failures

[Jeff Spaleta]

2008/9/9 Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com>:
> Often times, the only way to get somebody to work on these is to
> threaten to remove them from the distro.  It brings out the people who
> actually care about the packages so that they can work on making them
> build again.

As a maintainer I really need a way to know when one of my depchains
is in trouble so I can prioritize accordingly.  As Matthias pointed
out earlier in the thread, I'll be able to more quickly jump in and
help with one of my deps if I was notified that my package in in the
impending path of destruction.

Some people are going to be rockstar contributors and they will dig
into that list, just because they want to help as much as they can.
I'm not one of those people. I need to prioritize, and there are large
segments of the package repository that I must prioritize lower
compared to other work that I'm doing outside of Fedora packaging
work.  And since I know I'm the most typical, mediocre person in the
world.. I expect a lot of other contributors need to prioritize the
health of their packages in a similar manner.

Personally, I'd LOVE to see yet another email.. call it the ticking
bomb email... that told me which of my packages had unbuildable deps
are unbuildable..with a hard removal date if not fixed.

-jef