RFC: Fedora Extras EOL Policy

[Hans de Goede]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-04-14 at 18:41 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>> On Fri, 14 Apr 2006 16:06:59 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 2006-04-14 at 15:34 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 14 Apr 2006 13:11:02 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>>  * With terms like "end-of-life", "life-cycle", "maintenance state" come
>>>>>> promises with regard to the expectations raised by our users. It is
>>>>>> important that we don't keep a legacy branch open just because parts of
>>>>>> the contributor community insist on publishing updates for it, while the
>>>>>> majority has moved on to do only the current branches.
>>>>> Why not? If a part of the community is willing to maintain a package, they
>>>>> should be able to do it.
>>>> That would be the "some do, some don't" playground.
>>> Yes, and where is the problem?
>> The risk of FE becoming the infamous dumping ground of poorly maintained
>> packages.
> Face it: It already partially is - Such is the situation, no reason to
> complain about :-)
> 

That is not entirely fair, there always will be periods when a 
maintainer doesn't have time. The current if a maintainer doesn't do a 
timely rebuild for a new Release orphan it, is one mechanism for shaking 
out the real orphans and maybe we need another mechanism next to thayt, 
but saying that FE is a dumping ground is unfair. Debian has far more 
ancient packages (using ancient versus upstream as a maintainence 
measurement here) then FE. Also even core has packages which lack 
maintainance by this standard check out lm_sensors for example.

Regards,

Hans