Hi folks!
In discussions with other debian developers one important question was
mentioned:
Should we drop ancient/orphaned packages from our "distribution"
and move them to some other directory in the archive?
The background: We claim to have more than 200 volunteers working on our
distribution. A quick search showed me that we currently have 1543 (!)
packages (hamm+non-free+contrib+non-us).
However, there is long list of unmaintained packages:
ancient packages (old package format): 16
orphaned packages: 90
I think the problem is that it is "too easy" to create a new Debian
package now. Everyone just looks for new upstream packages and creates
.debs but does not want to maintain these packages a few weeks later.
That's why I suggest the following policy:
Packages without a maintainer ("orphaned packages") or packages which
are very old will be moved into the "project/orphaned" directory.
Advantages I see:
- packages are still available but you can't access them automatically
using dselect
- old packages which noone needs will be moved out of the
distribution
- packages that are important but which do not have a maintainer
will hopefully be taken over by someone else
- all packages in the distribution will have a real person taking care
of them
- porting to non-Intel platforms will hopefully get easier if all
packages are in the new package format (I was told that this is/was
a major problem in the porting process)
In summary: We currently have a mechanism of how to introduce new packages
but we should also have a "process" of how to get rid of (unmaintained
useless) packages.
(The `project/orphaned' directory has already been set up but it currently
only holds two packages.)
Any comments are welcome!
If the QA people agree with me I'll forward this to debian-devel.
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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