On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 11:16:57PM +0100, Maarten Vanraes wrote: > Op zaterdag 27 november 2010 22:07:43 schreef Michael scherer: > > On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 08:23:59PM +0200, Thomas Backlund wrote: > > > Jerome Quelin skrev 27.11.2010 19:11: > > > >On 10/11/27 17:59 +0100, Maarten Vanraes wrote: > > > >and, more importantly: what is the advantage? that is, what does that > > > >bring you, except more admin? > > > > > > QA! > > > and enduser satisfaction. > > > > > > Just take a look on many bugreports in MDV Bugzilla. > > > If the report is against a nomaintainer@ package, currently Triage > > > pretty much only can state "thanks for your report, but since it has > > > no maintainer, nothing will probably happend" wich is not good answer > > > for a person that have taken the time to report a bug. > > > > Then why don't we either : > > - decide that non maintened package must be taken care by trainee, as > > part of the training > > - decide to clean them. > > that's a great idea, we need more trainees! but of course, we can't do that > with all 5000+ unmaintained packages... > > is there a way to get rpm usage stats from those unmaintained packages.
No. We can only get download stats from mirrors. While it may be biased toward some geographical preference ( ie, I doubt many people download locale-zh from distrib-coffee ), it can give at least some ideas. Nothing precise, but still better than random. > > > By having the /extra/ disabled by default, and a popup notifying the > > > user if he enables it that the packages are "unmaintained" he knows > > > he's "on his own" > > > > That's already what the GPL say, basically :) > > ( you have no garantee of anything ). > > > > Yet, I fail to see what benefit it does really bring to users. Most of them > > will enable the media ( because some people enable everything ), will > > forget the message ( because we always forget popup, thanks > > to endless abuse of such popup ), > > and the only benefit is that we could tell "we told you". Not really > > satisfying, and if I was a user, it would not really please me, nor > > inspire confidence. > > some would, but that they'd also enable testing, backports, debug, etc... if > they really do so, it's kind of their own fault. i don't think the majority > does that. the majority leaves it at default. And so the majority will say "$distro is bad because there is not enough software". > The thing is that you have no guarantee, but the thing is, with mdv, there's > too much packages that just don't work; you install it, you click in the menu > and nothing happens because it doesn't work. So too much is 10%, more ? > same thing and one of them is in extra; then i get only one, if i can't find > any, i can enable the searching in extra and try to find a package that works. > > that's why i personally would prefer to leave these off by default. > > > We could avoid adding a media by merging this media with core, > > and show the popup when a user install a package without maintainer, > > telling either "beware, this package is currently marked as not maintained, > > and may be buggy. We will try to do what we can to help in this case, but > > no one is officialy in charge" or "we are seeking help on taking care of > > this package, if you use it often, please register on $URL" > > this popup will get ignored too; and persons who are perfectly aware of it, > will grow irritated. Then, we can do a single "do not ask me again", or just show it once ? > > futhermore: (no separate extra) > - huge amount of packages (think of the mirrors) mirror space is taken with extra or core. So the argument do not stand much. Now, this would be a arguent for simply erasing those unmaintained packages. > - huge hdlists Indeed. But if we want to have people be able to search inside like you said you would, this would still be downloaded, be used ( so in memory ) and on the mirror. So that's also not much a good reason. ( however, if we remove them... ) -- Michael Scherer