Soon to be marked dead packages

[Christopher Aillon]

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 23:38 -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>>> "CA" == Christopher Aillon <caillon at redhat.com> writes:
>> CA> The same thing that happens if I say I'll maintain them today,
>> CA> rebuild them, and then the day that FC6 is released, say I don't
>> CA> want them anymore.
>>
> If this happened with some regularity, the contributor would probably
> get a warning and then be de-sponsored.  Maintaining packages is about
> *maintaining*.  It means being responsible for them.  It means being
> available to take care of bugs, issue updates, and liaison with
> upstream.  If you don't have the time to do this responsibly then you
> shouldn't be pretending you can maintain the package.

Then we need a minimum requirement of time for package maintainers to serve.


>> So we should just give up and not bother trying to get unmaintained
>> things out of the distro?  Or do you instead have something
>> constructive to offer?
> 
> I second this.  Give us ideas so we can work out something that serves
> everyone's needs better.

I really am not sure why anyone would want to hear my opinion if my past 
opinions are deemed not "constructive".

Zack explained the Debian guys have a bunch of orphan criteria that are 
something like:
- Must have had a period for people to claim the package
- Has security or major bugs

Lean to leaving package in if:
- No blocker bugs
- Package still works
- Package still useful to people.
- Package is the latest upstream release
- Has unique functionality
- Package is popular
- ...? might be more.

Really, a package that meets the "don't orphan" criteria will have a 
maintainer soon.  There will be someone who will want to maintain it. 
So, rather than put the package in flux, and make it so that nobody can 
install it for the day or three that it's waiting on a new owner, we 
ought to be proactive about finding new owners, especially so on these 
packages.  Again, three people who are definitely not developers in the 
span of 24 hours found me about the package.  Removing packages harms 
users of the package.

Sure, this is devel.  They should expect brokenness.  But we shouldn't 
break things if we can help it.  In one instance, they are using devel 
because FC5 didn't support their hardware.