picking the best option from similar packages

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, seth vidal wrote:

>Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 15:01:19 -0500
>From: seth vidal <skvidal at phy.duke.edu>
>To: List for Fedora Package Maintainers <fedora-maintainers at redhat.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain
>Reply-To: List for Fedora Package Maintainers
>    <fedora-maintainers at redhat.com>
>X-BeenThere: fedora-maintainers at redhat.com
>Subject: Re: picking the best option from similar packages
>
>
>> Doesn't 2 vs. 5 years seem sort of academic? Degrees of deadness. ;-)
>> 
>
>5 > 2

I think what he is suggesting, is that projects that have had no
new releases in "n" days/weeks/months/years, have become
"unmaintained" and "dead".  As "n" increases beyond that value,
it just underlines the fact, but doesn't change it in any
noticeable way.

While it can be argued that some projects have theoretically 
reached a point of being "finished", where they have a complete 
feature set, and no known bugs, with no reason to further extend 
the software with additional features, I strongly question wether 
this is the case for these specific software packages?

Do either of them have bug reports open in our bugzilla?  In 
their upstream bugzillas or other trackers?  What is their 
security history?  What if new bugs are found and reported?  
Security flaws?  Is there an upstream maintainer still, who just 
hasn't had anything to actually do for 2-5 years, or have the 
maintainers abandoned the project(s)?

I think that's more what was intended.  ;o)

-- 
Mike A. Harris, Systems Engineer - X11 Development team, Red Hat Canada, Ltd.

IT executives rate Red Hat #1 for value:  http://www.redhat.com/promo/vendor