Dear Fesco: Orphan package process needs work

Josh Boyer jwboyer at jdub.homelinux.org
Wed Oct 4 15:40:43 UTC 2006


On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 11:12 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:

> The most important things in that whole sequence are the last two. 
> Clearly, dropping the package impacted Fedora users negatively.  And 
> there was community interest in maintaining the package, so it's 
> plausible that had it been given a fair process, it wouldn't have been 
> dropped.

Note that this is a result of the mass rebuild effort really.  Not the
orphan process.

> 
> 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.

> 2. Packages should never be dropped when they are orphaned until they 
> break.  Breaking can be defined as causing the tree to fail repoclosure, 
> or somethin.  Debian does something similar to this.  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.  Clearly that 
> was the case for NetworkManager-vpnc.  It's possible that it will be 
> *more* likely for someone to step up as maintainer if they realize there 
> is a package they use and nobody to update the package (people seem very 
> adamant about updated packages in extras).  Dropping packages carte 
> blanche without at least some sort of individual review is plain wrong.

See above.  Also note that it just got pulled from the repo, not CVS.

josh




More information about the fedora-extras-list mailing list