Dear Fesco: Orphan package process needs work

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 04 Oct 2006 10:40:43 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:

> > I believe the process for orphaning packages needs to address those.  I 
> > propose this:
> > 
> > 1. Clearly after davidz replied to the first mail and the "request for 
> > new owners" was dropped, then proceeded to do nothing, ANOTHER request 
> > should have been initiated and allowed to go through to the end to allow 
> >   someone to have the chance to take the package before it was 
> > "orphaned".  This should be MANDATORY, in my opinion.
> 
> Normally that happens.  This particular instance happened to line up
> with a mass rebuild, which is why it got removed.  Believe me, packages
> typically don't get yanked that quickly.

Except: Once they are marked orphaned, they cannot live in the
distribution for a long time.

We do not want orphaned packages to pile up. Filling Fedora Extras with
packages, which don't have any package maintainer, is not one of our goals.

And we need means to fight fire'n'forget packages, too.

> > 2. Packages should never be dropped when they are orphaned until they 
> > break.

I have strong doubts that FESCo will ever turn that into a policy. It is
ridiculous. If you are serious about that, propose reopening Red Hat
Contrib Anonymous FTP upload.

> > Breaking can be defined as causing the tree to fail repoclosure, 
> > or somethin.

Or bugzilla tickets getting old, unnoticed security vulnerabilities,
serious run-time failures without anybody taking notice.

> > Debian does something similar to this.

Who cares? This is not the Debian project. We have other requirements,
other problems. Open your eyes! Just look at the trouble we have with
the FE6 preparation!

> > The reasoning is 
> > that simply because the package is not "maintained" does not mean the 
> > package no longer serves a useful purpose to Fedora users. 

Unless that means "one user => one to volunteer as becoming the package
owner in FE" it's of no value to the project. Users dislike it very much
that we offer packages which are not assigned to a human-being in
bugzilla.